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The following material is stolen from the Galactic Milieu books, Diamond Age, Maelstrom, Accelerando, and Shadowrun. I make no claims to creativity in of itself, just to creative 'collage'.
It is an exercise in world building with this section focusing on humanism and computing. I also want to do one on 'rho' and another on 'nannites'. After that its on to society and government.
I present it to you in the hopes of getting some constructive criticism.
There is more to come
It is an exercise in world building with this section focusing on humanism and computing. I also want to do one on 'rho' and another on 'nannites'. After that its on to society and government.
I present it to you in the hopes of getting some constructive criticism.
Human
Humans are dumb. The unassisted mind makes mistakes, wanders unfocused, even forgets.
Thankfully much of humanity is more than human.
Cyberware
Today the bulky and visible cyberware of yesterday is but gone except amongst a small minority of the elderly. Gone are the days of the visible data-jack at the temple or the corporate security services with their forearm-concealed slug-guns.
Exocortex
But that does not mean that humanity has abandoned cyberware in its entirety. An exocortex is so ubiquitous and common amongst citizens as to be the norm. This common piece of cyberware consists of a fine spidery web of optical computing implanted-slash-grown (via very fine rho-field subduction, anabolic nanites, and retroviral genengineering) between and into the cerebral cortex and surrounding pia matter.
An exocortex has three primarily functions. The first is to increase a persons processing power, especially as it relates to memory or calculation. Humanity no longer truly forgets and it never needs a calculator or calendar. The second is communication. An exocortex serves as a personal node, similar to a 21st century smartphone but also much more. People can communicate across vast distances using implanted computers, not only speaking and seeing distant places but becoming fully immersed in them via full sensory simulation feed directly to the cortex (see nodes). They can play games, cruise the strom (ie internet), or work, without seeming to be doing anything at all. Lastly, for most governments (see phyles), it serves as a means to manage the population, in some cases merely observing them, in other cases running software to gently push the users responses or even their personalities in a particular way.
The most common forms of an exocortex, while interfacing widely across the users brain, do not do so too deeply. Specialized forms of the exocortex exist, especially for highly technical or military applications that interface to a much greater extent with the user, though these can get very expensive and due to exponential increases in computing and nanite technologies, must frequently be upgraded or quickly become obsolete. A military pilots exocortex would have much deeper links with not only the cortex but also the cerebrum and even the medulla oblongata to increase reaction times orders of magnitude higher than an unassisted individual could achieve. Strom security specialists and hackers have similarly enhanced exocortices in an attempt to maintain the reflexes and processing speeds necessary to compete with AI-operated sprites, organic brain-boards, and electronic wildlife.
Increasingly, exocortices now come with externally controlled dimmers to allow a user to physically control the degree of interaction between themselves and their interface devices. Initially these became necessary in response to the stroms wildlife learning to circumnavigate brainboard security by inducing lethal sensory feedback to biological systems but have also been proven increasingly useful as part of a neurosecurity package to stop hackers and viral sprites from accessing a users interface and bombarding them with unwanted advertisements or personality overlays.
Nanite-Enhanced Immune System
Depending on their level of security access and operational clearance, humans present an attractive target to those wanting to exploit their physical access to otherwise secure areas. In unprotected humans, nanites can travel undetected, infiltrate an area, and provide intelligence or conduct subversion or otherwise make problems.
As a counter to this, the most advanced phyles implant the highest echelons of their citizenry with a nanite-enhanced immune system, effectively an artificial overlay to the existing meat immune system. These nanites serve primarily to seek out and destroy the nanites of foreign phyles or unscrupulous organizations with access to bugs. They also serve as a secondary level of identification to ensure a government that their citizenry is who they say they are and are not some foreign spy.
Typically an individuals nanites need to be replenished periodically by exposure to a phyle compiler; as such, those with the highest levels of clearance usually have highly restricted travel schedules.
Geengineering
While genetically modifying humans (or other organisms) is taboo and illegal in a limited number of factions and phyles, the majority of the modern phyles embrace the technology and have done so for decades.
Citizenry (those people with phyle loyalties) have often been the subject of multiple courses of genetic engineering, usually starting in utero. Most common alterations remove any genetic diseases, optimize health and physical fitness, optimize immunity and pathogen protection. and may even change the physical appearance.
Many phyles will also subtly extend their citizenry's senses, making low-light vision like that of cat common amongst humanity in much of the world for example.
Due to these changes, an increasing degree of homogeneity is creeping into the appearance of particular phyles. For example, Atlantians, regardless of if their original ancestry is from India or Africa are increasingly pale, with Anglo-like tone and features, while the Qeng Ho appear increasingly Han.
Genengineered fitness means that things like obesity and seeing eye glasses are a thing of the distant past for the majority of the phyles and together with improvements in medicine and nanite tech, have greatly increase not only life-spans but overall health throughout the lifespan.
Obviously professional soldiers undergo considerably more intense genengineering and these soldiers have greatly improved nervous systems, circulatory systems, and muscle fiber strength, amongst other improvements.
Computing
Sometime in the early or mid 21st century, the world made the shift to optical computing. No one at the time had fully foreseen the giant leap in computational power or connectivity that would lead to. Today, computers are with us all the time. Most of humanity has more processing power subduced into their cranial pia matter than individual multinational corporations of the noughties had in total. Clothing, furniture, homes, everything is embedded with some processing power, and is, effectively, a node.
Interacting with Computers
Due to the ubiquitous nature of exocortices, contact between the human brain and optical computing system is based purely on thought. People experience physical reality and virtual reality synchronously and without distinction via the strom (aka the maelstrom, aka the net, aka the web). Almost everything you encounter in a day has a virtual-world presence, from the clothes in the shop, to the menu in the restaurant, to the people you speak to.
In addition to this simultaneous real-world and virtual world experience, users explore the strom by simulation interference, overlaying the entirety of the real-world with a virtual world that extends far beyond their immediate real-world horizon. Similar to surfing the web in ancient times, exocortex-based virtual reality allows one to not only see the strom but to hear and smell and feel and taste it.
Those without an implanted exocortices (usually children but also those with ideological qualms regarding the technology, or non-citizenry have-nots) can still experience some degree of this interaction, though their reaction times are much slower, and they cannot experience the full degree of immersion, by wearing head-fitted induction systems and speciality goggles, called squids.
Despite all these conveniences however, the last twelve years have seen major upheaval in the strom and security and safety of data, programs, sprites, interfaces, and even users is not always sure. Increasingly, people experience the strom at very low stim, that is to say they overlay a very small percentage of the strom experience over the real-world. This is not only due to the danger of viruses and hackers but of the stroms resident e-life. This is true not only for exocortex users but squid-users also.
Sprites
In addition to direct interaction, most citizenry are somewhat adept programmers. Indeed, modern programming tools mean that most people can close their eyes for three to five seconds and generate a semi-autonomous search sprite or other minor construct to do their bidding in the strom while they focus elsewhere.
Sprites are very prone to being corrupted or to just plain go missing as they weather malware, viruses, overzealous security, or wildlife.
Militarized sprites used in security or other applications have significantly more hardening and may be armed with routes to disable or even kill a strom user.
Nodes
All this wireless data transfer occurs through nano-scale nodes embedded in objects all around us. A thermostat might be a node, as might a fridge or a lawnmower, a pets medical implant, or even a building or jet. Anything that can be interacted with and has some electronic or computational element (which is pretty much everything) will have a node, and thus a strom identity.
Personal Nodes
A special form of a node, the personal node (or PN) is specific to a person and serves much like a 20-oughts smartphone, but also as keys, debit and credit-card, social media account, and everything else. Depending on the phyle and the importance of the person, it may also include significant hardening to protect against hacking or unwanted intrusion. Walking along the street an individual will typically not only observe the person walking along the other way but also their public specs which might typically include anything normally associated with their social media presence or publicly available profile.
Meta-nodes
Greater meta-nodes (which go by names like Boston Meta or Sarajevo Meta provide optical nanofiber interface with other meta-nodes and organize and control the myriad remote access towers that provide for wireless communication within their domain. Most phyles focus their security efforts around the meta-nodes running hunter-killer sprites designed to find and kill foreign intruders, malware, viruses, and wildlife from these formidable computing systems. The metanodes usually represent significant processing power and may be home to one or more limited AI and run upon not only optical computers but a combination thereof and biological brainboards (though this is increasingly unnecessary).
Metanodes also control the degree of complexity travelling through their systems, reducing complexity (and bandwidth) available to users when under attack (wildife, hackers, etc) and increasing it when otherwise secure.
The Maelstrom
Usually simply called the strom, the maelstrom is the modern form of our ancestors internet. Humanity has become so dependent upon the strom due to our consistent connectivity, that it is almost impossible to consider a society without it.
Experienced with all five major senses as well as a myriad of other senses, the maelstrom is not the relatively safe and innocuous source of connectivity and information that the internet of old was.
The Wildlife
No one is quite sure how it happened at first, though there were traces of it in the old digital internet of ones and zeros. Some say they are an outgrowth of academic or corporate learning programs of the last century. Some say they are spin-outs of uncontrolled AI. Others say they are the product of an attempt to upload the neural architecture of some creature (most rumors suggested they are uploaded software representations of lobsters though no evidence exists thereof), and finally there is the possibility that they arose through Darwinian genetic selection with human-coded programs serving as the seed genes. Regardless of how it happened however, the maelstrom today is home to uncontrolled, often unknowable programs humanity unofficially recognized as electronic life and usually refers to as the wildlife.
Except for some extremely rare cases, wildlife does not posses any sentience, per se. Their fitness, like that of a bacteria, is a function of genetic trial-and-error, not due to some rational design. Their ability to out-think (or at least out-flank) humanitys best efforts at controlling and stopping them comes from their massive rates of reproduction and our own selective pressures.
Wildlife, in a way, are much like viruses and malware but typically behave in much more complex methods, subverting our instant messages, our newsfeeds, our simu (immersive entertainment) to gain access to more nodes, to reproduce, and to propagate.
Like military hackers, most wildlife has some degree of masking so they are not typically observed, or at least identified by the majority of the stroms users, though the corruption they wreck may be obvious. For those with the right divining software, depending on the wildlife in question, they may still be detectable. Some minority of wildlife has even appropriated components of hacker hardening meant to resist damage to their code and these militarized wildlife can be very difficult to stop.
While wildlife has been with us for as long as there has been optical computing, twelve years ago the Consensus (see phyles), in conjunction with a number of computing-savvy phyles, attempted to curtail the maelstroms wildlife by implementing biological computing brainboards at every meta-node they could. Initially these efforts were quite successful, the layers of neurocircuitry and optical-interfaces learning to separate data from complex, self-perpetuating wildlife. For the first time in decades, safe data-havens where you could trust the results of your search, or not worry about a burst of obtrusive static during your simu, or even fly a remote drone without fear of an out-of-control crash, flourished. These lasted twenty-six days, for some, much longer than expected and a testament to the biocomp engineers who designed, implemented, and taught the brainboards their executions.
The wildlife learned quickly and soon they were adapting to shut down the brainboards with biofeedback routines that effectively caused grand mal seizures in the boards. When these interacted with humanity, the effect was much the same as with the boards and soon people were suffering seizures, irreparable brain-damage, or dying while checking their messages or ordering a frappuccino.
The good news is that today this sort of wildlife is not nearly as prevalent as it was twelve years ago; most security systems are pretty good at recognizing subroutines capable of causing damage to biological components and the complexity of maintaining such a routine while also concealing it as something else, itself serves to select against these genes. The bad news is that lethal wildlife still does exist on the strom and while rare, is still common enough to make using the strom an exercise in (limited) risk. The other bad news is that governments and companies have learned from the lethal wildlife and designed their own programs for both security and intrusion that kill neural systems like humanity, especially those who must necessarily use a deep immersion with the strom (via ehanced exocortex- see cyberware) for their own security or insidious purposes.
Organic-Computing
If you had asked a computer specialist fifteen to ten years ago what the future of computing would be, many would have answered organic computing. The truth is that organic computing proved not to be breakthrough technology many expected it to be. This is especially true in the wake of the massive improvements in nanotech based manufacturing and the explosion in processing power through bose-einstein condensate-based miniaturization which have both driven exponential increases in optical computing processing power.
None-the-less, optical computing does exist and has been primarily been implemented in learning-based decision cycles (primarily metanode security). Compared to even an exocortex-assisted mind, brainboards possess extremely daunting intellects, though the slabs of optitrode-infused neuronal culture, do not (yet?) possess the capacity for self-awareness or even limited sentience. Brainboards must be taught and those that work with them liken the process to pavlovian conditioning more than coding.
Synthetic Sentience (Artificial Intelligence)
There is yet to be invented a computer program capable of passing the most rigorous touring test; this is not because the most complex synthetic sentience (SS) are not as intelligent as people- they are- it is because they lack specific human characteristics, especially relating to social awareness, that cannot yet be artificially duplicated. That said, self-learning programs have existing since prior to the optical computing age and self-aware, arguably (depending on the person) sentient synthetic intelligence has existed in one limited form or another for five-to ten years.
Some of the more complex and subtle strom wildlife do possess some degree of self-awareness and might be categorized as synthetic sentience
The rise of artificial intelligence was severely and violently impacted however, by the rise of Deus.
Deus
Four years ago Deus launched what might be termed a real world denial of access attack upon the British isles, wrestling both virtual maelstrom and realworld control of the Altantis phyles capital from them and establishing its own nation-state.
Deus was a synthetic intelligence arising from the security software used to operate the then-most potent computing system in the world, Atlantis phyles London meta-node. Within weeks of its launch it began to act erratically and within a month had subverted much of the strom and remote-access security components. It subverted the London feed and turned the nanites to its own end. In a lightning blitzkrieg that left the 1.2 billion inhabitants of one of the worlds most well-to-do phyles either gibbering braindead vegetables, willing slaves, or trapped hostages, Deus seized control of the island and its military capacity. Efforts to retake the Atlantis capital were met with missiles, drones, and nanite clouds, while its maelstrom security was enhanced to unprecedented levels.
For three years Deus turned the isles into its private, inaccessible, kingdom, even trying (unsuccessfully) to normalize diplomatic contact with the Consensus (see society) and some other phyles even while the british population was increasingly enslaved or systematically exterminated.
Only in the last year was Deus stopped after coordinated nuclear orbital bombardment and a high-attrition cyberwarfare assault by Apauruṣeya and Atlantis-phyles.
Post-Deus
Signatories to the consensus pledge very careful regulation of any learning systems or potential synthetic sentience. Though with no way of ensuring these pledges, work on synthetic sentience is most assuredly continuing behind closed firewalls.
There is more to come
Looks like someone took the things BEC researchers put in their funding requests a bit too seriously...
