Homeline electronics

[warellis]

Originally Posted by Rupert

I would also avoid treating today's tech as being the standard measure for GURPS TLs. We've gone further down the road of miniaturised and massively networked computers than GURPS expected.

Originally Posted by warellis

In what way? I mean the last GURPS edition was made in like 2004 so it's not all that long ago really.

Originally Posted by Rupert

That's three years before the first iphone. Since then we've been putting 'smart', networked with wi-fi, cellphone connectivity, etc. electronics into just about everything. We store stuff in a 'cloud' that's whoknowswhere, and access it from any piece of electronics that we can persuade to take our user credentials, and large portions of the population are effectively never offline.

Originally Posted by weby

Mostly it is in the information tech and related, where Ultratech(UT) assumes that there is only 100 fold increase in computer speed between TL 8 and 9.

One of the related things is that it is a future where the iPhone was not invented and mobile internet is not a thing. UT speaks of being able to create combination gadgets and speaks of wearable computers and ability to download encyclopedias, High tech(HT) only speaks of the internet as file sharing,mail video conferencing and such, not the wast access to information that we take today for granted. The ability to Google a thing and receive almost any sort of information and the vast information trove in Wikipedia and so on is mindblowing when you think about it. What is even more amazing is that you can do it from almost anywhere with your smartphone. Characters has this TL 8 wearable computer that uses displayglases instead of a smartphone type device. And so on.

Then there are quite many more minor "more nitpicky" other tech trends that seem unlikely to go the way predicted in UT. in UT they have TL 9 smart car be with fuel cell and only TL 10 be full electric, Delivery drones be TL 10. Both electric cars and delivery drones seem more likely to be early TL 9.

Also there are things that will likely not be that way, there are implant communicators, with the one that taps optical nerves too being an oddity. If we indeed do that I would think it would always be a computer(like a smartphone) and not just a communicator. The extra thing needed to make it so much more useful would be minimal.

There is also a talk of generic home robots in UT, but neither UT or HT mention the robots quite many people have in their homes today, robtic vacuum cleaners and mowers.

HT has a number of technologies that are only listed as their 2007 levels, like the storage capacity of compters and external memory, the price of thermographs and so on.

In UT encrypted signals at TL 9 can be cracked in a personal computer in 1000 hours not 6.4 quadrillion years.

Basically technology predicting technology trends more than a year in advance is very hard, so it is no wonder that even in 10 years some things have gone sideways.

TLDR; In 10 years tech has gone sideways with inventions note foreseen in 2007.

Originally Posted by safisher

I finished my portions of High-Tech in late 2006. The first iPhone came out in June of 2007. We've had a decade of incredible growth in portable electronics, wearables, inter-connectivity, etc. My car drives itself, my phones knows and marks the when and where of every picture I've taken, and I can carry my whole library of GURPS books with me everywhere, in my pocket. I can watch my favorite movies anywhere, anytime I choose. Amazing.

Originally Posted by weby

Not only the access to such, but the fact that you carry it with you everywhere.

When you were using the DVSs and wanted to watch a show on the road you needed a separate gadget(portable dvd player) and even if you had the DVSs at home you had to take them with you. Today it is just one of the many things on the device you carry with you anyway.

The combination of mobile internet and a smartphone has really changed access to so many things. While HT talks about the internet there is obviously nothing about how ever present the mobile internet was going to be, because at that point it was a pain and slow to use on the few devices that supported it.

I mean, not even Apple saw it coming at that point and they were building the iPhone. But the original iPhone as it launched did not have Apps, they saw music to working as with the iPod, that is you download/rip the music to your music library on the device and so on.

GURPS 4E is, as of now, 17 years old. Back when it was written, some of the ideas on electronics and computer usage were different from how it turned out.

As I was reading through Infinite Worlds again, one of the text boxes on Homeline caught my eye:

Homeline TL
For game purposes, Homeline is a mature TL8 with a few TL9 pockets. (This means you can outfit Patrolmen with any TL9 gadget you’d like, but it can break or malfunction as entertainingly as possible.) AIs, for example, remain purely theoretical, although several expert research systems exist to harvest, sort, and handle data. Homeline’s space program is static, devoted to mining Earth-grazing asteroids rather than terraforming Mars or settling orbital space. Cars are safer, faster, more energy-efficient and better looking than 1998 models, but only their fuel cells (adapted from Lenin-3 models) are TL9. Fusion power, microtech factories, and genetic therapy are all TL9 in effect, but a very “safetech” TL9 that hasn’t bled back into the society at large outside the hospital. Whole-body cloning, artificial wombs, designer babies, and even wide-scale bionics remain controversial and undeveloped. Organ and limb cloning, healing, and general medicine and trauma care can be considered TL9.

Weapons are still mature TL8. Laser rifles have yet to reliably out-perform the M-23 assault rifle in testing, balky and experimental battlesuits are less practical than tanks, and the “smart spaceplane” remains on the drawing board thanks to the trillion-dollar cost of building the factories necessary to assemble its components. No nation except the United States has the resources to refit an entire military in the theoretical equipment used on other parallels, and the United States seems happy to stand pat for now (although rumors of TL9 weapons filter out from American special-forces bases and testing grounds). In the basic sciences, with the exception of psionics and parachronics, Homeline remains comfortably TL8.

Homeline Science
Technological development on Homeline diverged sharply from our own Earth when Van Zandt invented the parachronic transfer in 1998. How sharp that divergence was, and whether there were any other previous divergences, are unsolved questions. They will have to wait either until Infinity discovers our world, or until our world reaches 2027.

What even many Homeliners don’t appreciate is the change made in basic scientific progress by the accessibility of other timelines. Almost all the innovations a Homeliner thinks of as “parachronic spinoffs” – fusion plants, wrist-top weblinks, the leukemia cure, and even Mango Spredd – are actually thefts (or, in the best cases, fraudulently obtained licenses) from other worlds’ scientific establishments. The brilliant cancer and AIDS researchers of the 1990s, for example, took fat Infinity consulting contracts to vet other worlds’ cures, only sporadically attempting to integrate decades of parallel researches into Homeline’s own publications database. Similar effects occurred in almost every science; the sheer magnitude of the task discourages many scientists from even trying to master whole libraries of new scientific data, especially when other worlds may not quite have the same quantum setup Homeline does, so their results may not be reproducible. Finally, why bother working 15 years to perfect a vaccine or algorithm when Infinity could bring it home, already licensed and commercially proven, next week?

Almost all the really innovative thinkers in the sciences, except for a few eccentrics, have followed the money to either parachronic research and quantum physics (and related fields like cosmology and paleontology), or psionics research and brain-body biology. Here, at least, Homeline cannot harvest the poisoned honey of other worlds’ technology, and remains forced to pioneer its own.

From what it says, Homeline's own scientific advancement has, in some ways stalled.

Its researchers now feel it's easier to simply steal or copy other worldlines' tech instead of developing its own.

This brings me to the crux of the question: GURPS High-Tech: Electricity and Electronics mentions that smartphones are a TL8 technology:

Example: The first commercial cell phone was 10” long, weighed 1.75 lbs., cost $4,000, and only made analog phone calls; current smartphones are pocket-sized computers costing less than $1,000 – but both are TL8!

Small Computer (TL8): The internal components of a notebook, palmtop, or tablet. Rechargeable/8 hours. $100, 0.4 lb. 1996. Complexity 2.

Tiny Computer (TL8): The internal components of a smartphone or wearable. Rechargeable/8 hours. $50, 0.04 lb. 2007. Complexity 1.

However, due to both the period when Infinite Worlds was first written, and due to Homeline's own stagnating scientific achievements (why innovate when you can steal), is it possible some, or many, of the current personal electronics and interconnectivity we take for granted may not have really happened in Homeline by the 2020s, due to its particular focus on stealing other worlds' tech?

[warellis]

Homeline is probably(?) more advanced in computing, as shown by the palmtop mentioned here:

Palmtop: A rugged portable computer with built-in digital camera, voice recognition, pull-out floppy display screen, and augmented reality compatibility. For security it incorporates a fingerprint biometric scanner and a physical lock to deny unauthorized access. The computer uses a.custom architecture to reduce the possibility of infection by novel computer viruses or other electronic hazards. Opening the casing requires a Traps-6 roll to disable the anti-tamper.devices; failure means all data is erased (unrecoverable without superscience technologies) and a tiny explosive charge destroys the most advanced computing and memory.elements. Complexity 7, with 100 TB of usable data storage. $200, 3 lbs, D/20W (12 hours).

But it feels like it may have skipped some technology. Though it could be that "wrist top weblinks" are an equivalent to smartphones:

Almost all the innovations a Homeliner thinks of as “parachronic spinoffs” – fusion plants, wrist-top weblinks, the leukemia cure, and even Mango Spredd -are actually thefts (or, in the best cases, fraudulently obtained licenses) from other worlds’ scientific establishments.

[Emerikol]

This is one of the great threats of high tech peoples influencing low tech ones. It's arguably one of the reasons for the prime directive in Star Trek.

When a high tech society meets a low tech one, the low tech one almost immediately stagnates. In the examples you've been discussing it's mixed because homeline has access to advanced technologies but only in some areas. Still the negative impact on society is pretty clear.


I have something to consider. When I was growing up I lived in a rural county that hasn't really grown a lot in fifty years. In 1980, the sum total of all computing power and memory in the entire county does not compete with my single iphone. That is a mere forty one years of progress.

[Not]

Kirk: "Don't you see? They are gonna want a piece of our action!"

[warellis]

Yeah, it's insane in some ways how much computing has advanced in just 40 years really, and not just in smartphones but also PCs & laptops.

And exactly. It's possible Homeline has sort of a TL 9 equivalent of smartphones, but I suspect it's more like it jumped directly to that from a period where modern smartphones as we think of them didn't exist. So that by the time it may have encountered smartphones in other worldlines, it had sort of leapfrogged their development.

Kind of like going straight from bronze to steel, instead of transitioning from bronze to iron you could say.

And even then, thanks to the differences in social mores and philosophy of more advanced settings like Shikaku-Mon, Caliph, or Iskander-2 it's possible that while more advanced than TL8 in electronics and such, they may not have developed anything like say streaming data stored in a "cloud" because of something like say a more tightly controlled Internet equivalent for example.

So thus Homeline may not have ever developed such tech or services due to stealing and developing tech from worldlines that may have not thought of such.

I know it's probably an odd idea to think about, but I kind of like to imagine something like smartphones wouldn't come about at say mid-TL8 if you then encountered TL9 tech. Because the idea of pushing computers or electronics that small doesn't occur due to such an interruption.

[RedMattis]

Originally Posted by warellis

Kind of like going straight from bronze to steel, instead of transitioning from bronze to iron you could say.

I mean, technically people back then were making steel, it was just really crappy and inconsistent steel full of unwanted impurities. By modern standards.

Pure iron barely exists naturally. Iirc. only meteoric iron.

[warellis]

Originally Posted by RedMattis

I mean, technically people back then were making steel, it was just really crappy and inconsistent steel full of unwanted impurities. By modern standards.

Pure iron barely exists naturally. Iirc. meteoric iron mostly.

I understand. I'm just saying I suspect Homeline may not have really pushed TL8 information or electronics tech as far as other worldlines (or real life) may have due to stealing & reverse engineering various bits of tech that are sort of better.

And, at the same time, may not have pushed social media or its Internet connectedness as far either possibly.

Because it had no need to push its TL8 electronics as far. It could use ideas or tech possibly stolen or copied to make up for whatever inefficiencies they currently face. Or just plain replace it.


Especially due to the potential fact the more technologically advanced worldlines it may have stolen or copied from may not have had the same social ideas to push for stuff like that.

For example, Shikaku-Mon's Tapestry (their name for the equivalent of our/Homeline's Internet) is far more compartmentalized due to the fact the societies there are more autocratic and run by paranoid & often corrupt elites.

Do you think such a society would develop the kind of streaming services or possible social media (for better or worse as we may think of such) we use today?

Me, I suspect not.


And it's not just personal electronics as well. Look at their cars. They use fuel cells copied from Lenin-3 for them. And yet in real life electric vehicles are the big thing slowly replacing gasoline powered vehicles.

They may not have thought of electric cars really because they didn't naturally push or stumble upon the idea, they just copied fuel cell tech instead.


Thinking on it, what Homeline is doing reminds me of how Soviet leaders decided to just copy the West in computer tech instead of nurturing Soviet computer engineers to build & develop their own.

[RedMattis]

Real-world inventions are mostly about taking a bunch of stuff that has already been figured out an combining them in new/different ways.

We have batteries and we have cars. Can we make electric cars?

Or for Homeline. We have fuel-cells and we have cars. Can we make fuel-cell cars?

Those are both the same thing really.

What does matter is if they have scientists sitting around experimenting with chemistry, physics, etc. to make the puzzle pieces which can be used to make inventions.

Also, from a society perspective whether or not they feel invested in the idea of making f.ex. electric cars. Probably yes in Homeline's case since (especially considering their background) sustainability is much more important to them than Infinity; which on the flip side I can see doing far worse than just dumping garbage into 'empty' worlds.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by warellis

It's possible Homeline has sort of a TL 9 equivalent of smartphones, but I suspect it's more like it jumped directly to that from a period where modern smartphones as we think of them didn't exist. So that by the time it may have encountered smartphones in other worldlines, it had sort of leapfrogged their development.

I'm put in mind of what I've read about many third-world nations, which basically went from having no telecommunications for the bulk of their citizens to having cell phones, with no landline-phone intermediate (except for some of the elites, anyway).

Originally Posted by warellis

Look at their cars. They use fuel cells copied from Lenin-3 for them. And yet in real life electric vehicles are the big thing slowly replacing gasoline powered vehicles.

They may not have thought of electric cars really because they didn't naturally push or stumble upon the idea, they just copied fuel cell tech instead.

I'm pretty certain a fuel cell car is an electric car, it just gets its electricity from ultra-efficient fuel cells rather than the massive batteries our electric cars use. This does mean refueling is different, of course - you've got to swap out the fuel cell(s) (or perhaps refuel them directly with H2) rather than plug the vehicle into the electric grid for a while. If they find a parallel with some sort of rechargeable battery/supercapacitor that gets better energy density than Lenin-3's fuel cells (given said devices are reproducible, and functional on Homeline), they could switch to electric vehicles like our own (but far superior) fairly readily.

The important bit, of course, is the whole "find a parallel" part. As noted, Homeline's science has largely stagnated - they are like the Covenant from Halo, failing to create for themselves (the Covenant just modified and used Precursor tech rather than developing their own, Homeline just modifies and uses outtimer tech rather than developing their own).

This may well be unsustainable.

[warellis]

Do you think Homeline's TL8 tech may thus be a little weird to real life eyes?

Like it seems a bit more dated than our own, in some aspects?

Originally Posted by RedMattis

Real-world inventions are mostly about taking a bunch of stuff that has already been figured out an combining them in new/different ways.

We have batteries and we have cars. Can we make electric cars?

Or for Homeline. We have fuel-cells and we have cars. Can we make fuel-cell cars?

Those are both the same thing really.

What does matter is if they have scientists sitting around experimenting with chemistry, physics, etc. to make the puzzle pieces which can be used to make inventions.

Also, from a society perspective whether or not they feel invested in the idea of making f.ex. electric cars. Probably yes in Homeline's case since (especially considering their background) sustainability is much more important to them than Infinity; which on the flip side I can see doing far worse than just dumping garbage into 'empty' worlds.

To me, the interesting thing is the potentially uneven development of tech Homeline experienced once parachronics became a big thing for it.

It's not that they copy without understanding the principle behind tech, but more like they copy possibly without having needed to innovate to understand the reasoning behind outtimer tech, I kind of think.

This isn't Homeline doing TL(8+1) but more like just jumping to TL9 in some places via replacing older tech.