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Old 01-11-2007, 05:45 AM   #11
Max Schreck
 
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Default Re: Bioroid Identification

Quote:
Originally Posted by Nelson Cunnington
Voight-Kampf test. Shouldn't take more than twenty, thirty questions, cross-referenced.

"You're in a desert, walking along in the sand when all of a sudden you look down..."

...and you see a tortoise."

"A tortoise? What's a tortoise?"

"You know what a turtle is, Leon? Same thing."

:) Funny guy, Nelson.

All jokes aside, could a Blade Runner-esque scenario be plausible in TS?
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Old 01-11-2007, 09:23 AM   #12
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Default Re: Bioroid Identification

My $.02, slightly devalued since I've read 4e Biotech more recently than Transhuman Space, and the new material may or may not apply.

The point to biofacture is to be cheaper and/or faster than letting your biological product grow up naturally. This will always leave some traces, even if you're trying to hide the origin of your product. It might take several days of forensic work (including some deep genetic work), but a bioroid will always have "tool marks" somewhere in its biologicals. It might be a Toxic Meme that someone like the TSA intelligence services could make a truly undetectable bioroid.

Under normal circumstances, where you're not trying to hide a bioroid's origins, I'd expect there to be markers equivalent to manufacturer and serial number easily available to a quick test by first responders like EMTs or police.

There will also be social factors on top of the consequences of the technology. In a society where bioroids can be made, but they are second-class citizens, there'd be strong social pressure for them to be obvious. It could be as obvious as mandatory v-tagging, or something that needs some cultural familiarity to track. The SF cliche that androids always speak polite formal English and never ever use contractions would be an example of something that might be programmed in.
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Old 01-11-2007, 11:24 AM   #13
Phil Masters
 
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Default Re: Bioroid Identification

Standard bioroids canonically have Unusual Biochemistry and Feature: Intron Messages. This suggests that they should be detectable by some kind of (probably pretty standard) biochemical test. It'd need special equipment, but hey, what's "special" in 2100?

Which is why I put the alternative "Concealed Bioroid Body" meta-trait into Changing Times. Because it seemed very likely that somebody, somewhere, would want a bioroid that could dodge that sort of test, at least some of the time...
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Old 01-11-2007, 01:42 PM   #14
Nelson Cunnington
 
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Default Re: Bioroid Identification

Yeah, the V-K test would only be required in a setting where genetic analysis was expensive and required delicate, non-portable equipment with a highly trained operator examining single DNA molecules (presumably the case in Blade Runner, made before even PCR was invented); or perhaps where privacy laws forbid invasive sampling without a warrant, even to the extent of forbidding the sampling of skin cells shed on police premises, for example.

Of course, in a setting where bioroids are second-class citizens, one passing itself off as a human would be shielded by privacy laws covering humans until such a time as it could be proven to be a bioroid.
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Old 01-11-2007, 02:51 PM   #15
Pmandrekar
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Default Re: Bioroid Identification

Quote:
Originally Posted by tratclif
The point to biofacture is to be cheaper and/or faster than letting your biological product grow up naturally. This will always leave some traces, even if you're trying to hide the origin of your product. It might take several days of forensic work (including some deep genetic work), but a bioroid will always have "tool marks" somewhere in its biologicals. It might be a Toxic Meme that someone like the TSA intelligence services could make a truly undetectable bioroid.

Under normal circumstances, where you're not trying to hide a bioroid's origins, I'd expect there to be markers equivalent to manufacturer and serial number easily available to a quick test by first responders like EMTs or police.
Under normal circumstances, this is probably true. Legitimate corporations that manufacture bioroids would not have a strong interest in hiding their affiliation with the product. But I would argue that your first paragraph that the point to biofacture is cheaper is true, but the question is *how much cheaper*. at TL 13, for example, it might be a question of a few dollars, so someone trying to set up the manufacture of a bioroid not to be detectable as such at TL 10 might be able to do so efficiently, and the cost might be worth the cover.

Imagine a TL 13 culture trying to *seed* a TL 8 or TL 9 civilization with bioroids for some purpose. They might find it relatively cheap and worthwhile to cover their tracks, genetically, for the benefit of not being detectable to the TL8/TL9 science.

In the context of Transhuman space, the Tech Level of the person trying to hide their work against the Tech Level of the people trying to uncover it will make a difference, but you're not talking about TL8 to TL13 ranges, so generally, I would agree with you.

Every Tech Level, especially in science, tends to result in being able to do the same thing faster with more accuracy. My graduate advisor took months to sequence a single gene in the 1970's. By contrast, in 2007, with the right genetic positional information (i.e. primers specific to the gene location), there's no reason that one couldn't do the same work in the space of a couple of days, with the right equipment.

-P.
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