[Discussion] Transhumanism in Fenspace

[Cobalt Greywalker]

It’s probably because I’ve been on a Transhumanism kick lately (a couple of fics here and there have grabbed my attention, as have a thread or two), but I suspect its gideon020’s Triax thread that’s got me seriously thinking.

How much Transhumanism do you think is good for Fenspace?

I mean, we already have a fair chunk of it hanging around. There’s biomods and cyborgs and at least medical cloning tech.

Neural Interfaces? Yep, we have those. There mostly for the total cyborgs at the moment, but we have neural induction helmets just as good.

Memory augmentation? Yes we do, even if it’s not really around due to it being used for crime. The same goes for Forking.

Uploading…well, sorta. Not in a reliable way at least.

The major transhumanist enablers that we don’t have are workable nanotech and human genetic engineering. Yet.

One thing I have noticed is that we (The Fenspace Collective) are trying to be Genre-savvy about these things. Too much too soon pushes seems to push people towards the Genre Directive; they recoil, and relegate things to MacGuffin-hood. Still, I’d like to think we’re all smart people here. Hopefully we can work something out.

As it currently stands, all the big tech advances are going to come from the Bad Guys. Understandable, given its amazing what you can develop if you don’t have conventional morality to hold you back.

Unless there’s a Cabal of tech developers who HAVE developed all those neat toys, but are cautiously preparing Fen and Dane for their gradual release. Of course, all those carefully thought out timetables can get thrown out the window if the Black Hats put out something…

Comments?

[robkelk]

There's a fair amount of "transhumanist" tech and theory in the Whole Fenspace Catalog, and Noah didn't redact very much of it... (Noah's all right with a settlement or a faction heading for the Singularity, as long as he doesn't have to go along for the ride. He likes being human.)

A careful reading of the character template for the Scott-series androids indicates that they have been able to fork (and mix the forks!) since day 1, and shows exactly how they could do it. They don't do it by personal choice. The technique might or might not be usable by other AIs.

I (the writer) am comfortable with human genetic engineering being part of the setting - Leda Swansen-Scott is a genetic engineer with a good reason to at least examine her own gene sequence, after all. If we want something amazing to come out of the Vesta Institutes instead of from Boskonia, I'm fine with that.
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

[Dakota]

Cobalt Greywalker wrote:

---

It’s probably because I’ve been on a Transhumanism kick lately (a couple of fics here and there have grabbed my attention, as have a thread or two), but I suspect its gideon020’s Triax thread that’s got me seriously thinking.

How much Transhumanism do you think is good for Fenspace?

I mean, we already have a fair chunk of it hanging around. There’s biomods and cyborgs and at least medical cloning tech.

Neural Interfaces? Yep, we have those. There mostly for the total cyborgs at the moment, but we have neural induction helmets just as good.

Memory augmentation? Yes we do, even if it’s not really around due to it being used for crime. The same goes for Forking.

Uploading…well, sorta. Not in a reliable way at least.

The major transhumanist enablers that we don’t have are workable nanotech and human genetic engineering. Yet.

One thing I have noticed is that we (The Fenspace Collective) are trying to be Genre-savvy about these things. Too much too soon pushes seems to push people towards the Genre Directive; they recoil, and relegate things to MacGuffin-hood. Still, I’d like to think we’re all smart people here. Hopefully we can work something out.

As it currently stands, all the big tech advances are going to come from the Bad Guys. Understandable, given its amazing what you can develop if you don’t have conventional morality to hold you back.

Unless there’s a Cabal of tech developers who HAVE developed all those neat toys, but are cautiously preparing Fen and Dane for their gradual release. Of course, all those carefully thought out timetables can get thrown out the window if the Black Hats put out something…

Comments?

I suspect you won't see anything really huge transhumanism for a few more seasons. Like magic, while it's been set loose, doesn't seem to be something that will have a major effect on Fenspace for a few seasons itself.
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Characters
Sabre Fang
Dakota

[ECSNorway]

There will always be -some- Fen who will want to go the transhumanist route. There will also be many who do -not- want to go that way. And the general nature of the Convention lends itself well to people not pushing others into picking it up.

Then again, there probably -is- a Rock full of brainlinked cyborged meta-conscious hive-mind out there somewhere.

Then again, there are also Klingons.
--
Sucrose Octanitrate.
Proof positive that with sufficient motivation, you can make anything explode.

[M Fnord]

How much Transhumanism do you think is good for Fenspace?

That's a very good question, and I wish I had an equally good answer for it. I think Fenspace as a setting is robust enough that it could handle transitioning into something transhuman - not a Singularity necessarily, but something along the lines of Nova Praxis / Eclipse Phase / pulpy Transhuman Space would fit well within Fenspace's boundaries. Eventually the combination of sorcery and transhumanism will cause Fenspace to evolve into Al Hazard... but then I suppose somebody's got to be, right?

The question might be better phrased as "how much transhumanism are the writers down with?" For myself I'm pretty happy with letting things evolve in a more transhumanist direction... but I don't see a consensus there. I'm not so sure it slams into the genre directive so much as it's something the majority of writers just aren't comfortable with. And, y'know, I grok that. Some of the stuff you guys come up with I'm not comfortable with. So I suspect the level of transhumanism is going to shift depending on the Collective's comfort level above and beyond anything else.
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery

FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information

"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"

[Dartz]

I've been mucking with a lot of this in the back of my mind. I do like playing with these themes and taking a peek beyond the event horizon at the singularity beyond. The Wolkenritter dance around the hive-mind concept in a way that I just found interesting to do. (Even though I forgot one already existed - in way).

What can you do when you've got a DNI to a computer? Ultimately, the only limit there is software, and computing power. And even if you can't get all that computing power inside the cyber'd head, you can certainly run links to external hardware processing for items where latency isn't an issue. Ultimately, the cyber involved could have various full or over-size bodies with different capabilities and software interfaces that they can swap between. The Wolkenritter were so complex they originally couldn't live without external computational support.

Genre savviness is a thing - it's hard not to be when there's a lot of fiction out there where Transhuman technologies Go Horribly Wrong. On the other hand, I'd hate for things to go the Federation route. When we were writing Cat's Cradle, we always intended Quattro's tech to be incomplete - a mad's madness that had some severe limitations on its use to the point where, as it was in 2015. it's nothing more than a proof of concept, but no real effective uses beyond the malicious. It's far easier to create an abuseful version of a technology, than it is to create a useful version. But it's still possible that it will lead to something useful in the future - it can be finished.

So it was put away for future research because it still had interesting potential worth exploring. Henning's doing things with it amongst the catgirls, but it's taking time and effort to makes something enuinely safe and useful and repeatable out of it and they don't want to frighten people who are genuinely afraid of this technology. I wouldn't call it a McGuffin when Catgirl industries is quietly being built around it, the hardware is still extant at Grunthal (And was used again on Daisuke Edo in a way that both saved his life, and made describing certain relationships much harder) and the creator....***mumble****. And it's still having an effect 8-9 years later.

It's very risky stuff to play with and experiment with - especially sapient trials because of the fragile nature of the mind. If you screw up, you either destroy your mind, destroy your volunteer's mind or have another fun result like catgirl hive-minds so doing real transhumanist stuff and doing it reliably is still extraordinarily hard. If you're not worried about quality of life for the failures or reliability.... you can take a lot of shortcuts but you get a much less useful product.

It isn't hard to imagine there being a negative bias towards the extreme end of transhumanist technologies and modifications for a long time. In part, because of the Boskone doing things like Bersekers and other super-warrior projects. Berserkers, for example, likely led to the development of Quality-of-Life criteria for cybernetics enforced by the Cyber Confederation to keep people from abusing these technologies and maintain proper oversight of what research actually is happening on the subject.

It is the Age of Exploration, and not all Exploration involves going places. It's not about charting nebulas and planets, but exploring the unseen possibilities of existance.
Or Eclipse Phase with Magitech. Magitech combat cyborgs with hot-swappable bodies, farcaster backup, and external neuroprocessing support... giggle

Practically, it helps to take baby-steps. To get more mileage out of an interesting universe and to make it feel like a development, rather than BLAM. Part of what's holding me back isn't the genre-directive as such - but that I don't really want to change things too much too fast for everyone else and go off the deep end. Or do too much for myself.

On the other hand, there is the elephant in the room that is Dee and the other S-class AI's that're already massively beyond human. Who's to say they aren't in some way exerting a subtle influence to make sure that whatever takeoff happens isn't a full blown hard-launch like the TITANs.
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--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?

[Logan Darklighter]

I'm just using transhumanism as an excuse for introducing my villians into Fenspace, I don't really care either way.

[HRogge]

Like Dartz said I have been playing with ideas taken from Eclipse Phase and GURPS Transhuman Space from the beginning of Catgirl Industries.

The catgirls might be not interested in cybernetics, but they are diving deeper and deeper into the secrets of the metahuman mind.

The tech what enabled them to start their journey, Quattros memory manipulation technology, was a powerful but "raw" tool, which was a great way to do a lot of damage to the victims... not that Quattro cared about this.

It took CI years to carefully streamline the device and to learn about patterns in the outcoming data. It took them more years to create the first real application, and even more years to make it stable and secure enough to be able to offer them as a service. But slowly Catgirl Industries will change from the inside out.

Even before 2020 there will be the first 'memory fingerprint' scanners, which allow persons to create some kind of signature of their memories and check themselves for manipulations. There will be also the first versions of a "skill sharing" system, which allows to transfer the facts (but not the complete understanding) of a skill from one brain to another one, enabling to learn things faster than before.

In the mid 2020s the knowledge about "mind pattern" will become good enough to make 'compact' backups of persons, but it will still take a few more years until these backups can also run on a computer. This will lead to "virtual pilots" for vehicles, catgirls temporarily leaving their bodies to control a vehicle from within a computer, similar to an AI. Egocasting will also become possible, even if the amounts of data make it difficult to transfer a complete person quickly. In theory forking would also be possible, but creating new organic bodies is still expensive and the catgirls don't like artificial ones.

My personal idea about Catgirl Industries is that they will move away from a money based society to a reputation based one. You are the author of a great 'skillsoft' or another widely popular media? It will be more worth that solar credits within CI. This also means that you will get a copy (including how to make it yourself) for most technologies the catgirls know, knowledge can be shared without loss.

From the outside Catgirl Industries will still look and "feel" like a normal Fen faction, but below the surface people will find all kinds of strange/unusual things going on.

Long term goal of Cortana and Serina will be the creation of a new catgirl biomod with a brain that can run a high level "class A" mind... so that they don't have to leave the catgirls behind when they try to break the S-class barrier together.

[Logan Darklighter]

Also, I think I also might have watched the trailers for the Elysium movie a few too many times.