[Official!] Project Horizons Comment Crew Chat thread.

[Harmony Ltd.]

I have never watched or read Naruto. Though I may have watched more episodes of Bleach than would be considered sane (read : more than one lol ).

On the other hand, I've been exposed to several seasons worth of Ranma 1/2.


But TBH I was more inspired by San Francisco in Fallout 2 regarding the competing martial art schools.

[Harmony Ltd.]

But to answer your question, that was me poking fun at the stereotypes of the genre.

[Ironmonger]

Thought so. My brain's tried to run out of my ear so many times today that I can't hardly tell what someone is getting at with their humor. :V

[RoboRed]

@ Robo : I'm thinking about your songs, gimme a moment to let them sink in...

Figure out anything yet?

[Harmony Ltd.]

Maybe this weekend, I'll be away most of today.

I think next time we should limit ourselves to one song / track per "post", because more than that becomes a bit too overwhelming.

That and we can't spend all the good stuff at once, y'see ?

[Harmony Ltd.]

And regarding that Vault / Stable, given a majority of the population bears the genes for congenital diseases, with only a minority of the population being "conform", I think we would rapidly see them putting in place some kind of eugenicist policy in order to get rid of the bad genes in a few generations...

With all the social consequences that may entail (breeders, anyone ?).

[Sindri]

And regarding that Vault / Stable, given a majority of the population bears the genes for congenital diseases, with only a minority of the population being "conform", I think we would rapidly see them putting in place some kind of eugenicist policy in order to get rid of the bad genes in a few generations...

With all the social consequences that may entail (breeders, anyone ?).

Well, with good enough cybernetics, any genetic disorder that doesn't hurt the brain becomes irrelevant. A bad heart can be replaced with tech. A bad spine can be replaced with tech. Lungs, digestive systems, sensory organs, various glands and horomones... with good enough tech they can all be enhanced or replaced wholesale. The reproductive organs would be kept intact if they didn't have full cloning capability for reproduction (but any genetic problem that screws those up doesn't get passed on anyway), and you can't really improve upon a brain, but for everything else they might as well shift to fully mechanized bodies.

That's always been pretty much my stance on genetic tinkering in humans in real life; sure you could alter the kids before birth or during conception, and it would probably be great to remove genetic disorders that way, but it's a hell of a lot simpler to fix any mechanical problems or add new capabilities once they're grown. And it has the added moral advantage of being the choice of the person whose body and life are involved, instead of something determined by their parents before they're born. And the added practical advantage of things being swappable and upgradeable almost on the go, instead of new advancements only benefiting the next generation down or taking years of expensive gene treatments to convert over existing tissue.

[Harmony Ltd.]

I was thinking they would do both :

Start by using drugs and augments to get past the genetic defects, while trying to get rid of the genetic defects - if only so that they can be stronger and fitter.

[Sindri]

I was thinking they would do both :

Start by using drugs and augments to get past the genetic defects, while trying to get rid of the genetic defects - if only so that they can be stronger and fitter.

Well, if they had the tech for it, they'd probably try to fix the bugged genetics, but I doubt that they would restrict reproduction to those with better meatsuits when most of it is going to be replaced with chrome anyway. If anything after a few generations they'd probably be selecting for ease of augmentation rather than natural capability.

Of course if they have good cloning tech that shifts everything around. Starting with how they no longer need to build their bodies to support a reproductive system unless they have a personal preference for it. And probably allowing them to mix and match genetics from anypony in the Stable, alive or dead as long as there are good enough samples left over.

But I'm probably underestimating the attachment a normal person would have to their natural body. I've always thought of my body as mostly a tool: life support, transportation, sensors, and manipulators attached to my brain, where everything important was. I'd take the option for full cybernetic conversion in a second if it were offered, and if it was at least comparable in every aspect I considered important. But most people seem to tie their flesh to their sense of self, and a lot of those who have lost limbs or whatever have serious mental problems because of it where I'd probably just feel inconvenienced.
Maybe it has something to do with my asexuality? Gender is a big part of self for most people, and reproductive capability is a major motivation or point of pride a lot of the time, even for those without immediate plans to use it. And from transexuals there are all manner of accounts of the body being wrong, and fixing the mechanics or at least the aesthetics of it having a huge beneficial effect... Maybe when somebody thinks of themself as a man or a woman the body is important, but when they think of themself as a mind wrapped in an organic machine there's no impact to switching parts of it for synthetics?
And of course I'm probably rare even among asexuals on that point. I'm sure there are a lot who identify as 'an asexual man' or 'an asexual woman' instead of just some vague neutral entity.

Bluh. Now I'm going to be thinking on this for hours at least, probably weeks. And I very much doubt I'll come to any meaningful conclusions. Anybody know of professional papers on the subject, or want to chime in with their views?
Double-bluh. I thought I finished all this stupid 'figuring out what the fuck I am' shit back in freshman year of college. I have more interesting things to deal with!

[Ironmonger]

Spoiler:

[Harmony Ltd.]

From my point of view, it is dangerous to become too reliant on technology when it comes to life itself.

I go for ruggedness before any other consideration, and you could try to argue it at length, but in the end the body of a standard human specimen is pretty damn rugged : give it just a bit of food & water, supply it with a constant influx of fresh air, and as long as you don't throw some shit at it it'll continue to run for decades with minimal need for external maintenance. Do you know many machines with such performances ?

That's why my personnal approach to the question, before going into full eugenism mode, would be to reinforce this innate ruggedness by working on maybe augmenting the immune system or repairing it if it is defective, and working on the capabilities of the body to self-repair.

Well, I guess if your personnal background is to have had problem with your body for years (bad vision, bad health, etc.) you wouldn't hesitate getting rid of it for a superior replacement. But I would guess that most people are happy with what they have, and would prefer simply improving on a few details rather than changing the whole picture.

But anyway, in this scenario I don't think they would have the necessary infrastructure (knowledge and machines) to directly tinker with the genes. At most they would be able one's genome to detect propension for diseases.

[Sindri]

I go for ruggedness before any other consideration, and you could try to argue it at length, but in the end the body of a standard human specimen is pretty damn rugged : give it just a bit of food & water, supply it with a constant influx of fresh air, and as long as you don't throw some shit at it it'll continue to run for decades with minimal need for external maintenance. Do you know many machines with such performances ?
...
Well, I guess if your personnal background is to have had problem with your body for years (bad vision, bad health, etc.) you wouldn't hesitate getting rid of it for a superior replacement. But I would guess that most people are happy with what they have, and would prefer simply improving on a few details rather than changing the whole picture.

Oh yeah, no question about durability. Human flesh might be squishy but the auto-repair function is beyond anything we'll be able to build for centuries.

But in this Stable? First, ponies have repair talismans for high end machinery. Second, there's enough tech everywhere and everybody is smart enough that it seems like diagnostics would be common and repairs easy even without that shiniest of magics. And in any case, the emphasis seems to be on cutting-edge performance over long periods between servicing, so synthetic parts would do better there even if you had to replace the joints in your legs after each match.

As for myself, I've never really felt wrong in this body or anything like that. I don't have any major defects below the neck, I got lucky enough with genetics to not have any allergies, my joints and muscles are sufficient for my purposes, the genitalia are an inconvenience but not sufficient to do anything drastic... really my only big complaint is the migraines. To fix that I think I'd need to swap out the skull though, and that's a technology we are unlikely to develop in my lifetime.

But for one thing, it seems so... inefficient? Human muscles are remarkable, they put out much more force than you could get with the same energy mechanically, but they still use energy when they're idle, they atrophy if you leave them for too long, the only way to increase their capacity is to consistently overuse them for an unacceptable length of time on a regular basis (I got shit to do), they tend to get all these weird kinks and aches for no good reason, and generally it just seems like mechanical parts would be better. They evolved to be practically perfect for a steady level and variety of activity, and to use very little energy in the process, but in an industrialized nation when you have plenty of food and a job that involves not moving for extended periods they just aren't optimal anymore.

And the eyes... mine are good enough to see in a blurry way without my glasses, but with modern camera technology I could get so much better precision at short and long ranges, see into different parts of the spectrum, save and compare images, interface with machinery without bothering with a monitor...

And you can't tell me that you don't see the appeal of modularity, or add-ons like built-in tools and such.

As for reliability, we've got all manner of machines from pacemakers to satellites that are designed to run for years without intervention. And built-in diagnostics could alert you to problems long before you'd even have noticed them in an organic body. Sure it requires outside maintenance when something does break, but that shouldn't be much harder than normal doctoring.

And in the long run... people die. Organs fail, cancers grow, and everything generally just breaks down over the years. Going full cyborg wouldn't make me immortal, but outside of the rapid and total failure of a system which would have multiple redundancies and get repaired or replaced whenever needed, I wouldn't be killed by anything below the brain stem. And sure, a brain tumor or something would get me eventually but I could make very good use of those extra decades, especially in a body as or more capable as when I was in my twenties.

[Guest]

@Cybernetics
Ooh, ooh, this topic is fun! And since we're buried in snow, I've got little else to do! :D Anyway, I think one area of potential concern for a lot of people (outside of class concerns, which are irrelevant to the current discussion) is that swapping out parts of the body with machinery really does change how your mind works - if it didn't, it almost certainly wouldn't work, since what you have is not, say, an arm made out machinery, but a device that functions similarly to an arm. What you have is still a person (inasmuch as that means something - it's an ongoing debate), but is something potentially different from a human, depending on how you classify "human." And that scares a lot of people; and there is some reason to think it should.

[Sindri]

@Cybernetics
Ooh, ooh, this topic is fun! And since we're buried in snow, I've got little else to do! :D Anyway, I think one area of potential concern for a lot of people (outside of class concerns, which are irrelevant to the current discussion) is that swapping out parts of the body with machinery really does change how your mind works - if it didn't, it almost certainly wouldn't work, since what you have is not, say, an arm made out machinery, but a device that functions similarly to an arm. What you have is still a person (inasmuch as that means something - it's an ongoing debate), but is something potentially different from a human, depending on how you classify "human." And that scares a lot of people; and there is some reason to think it should.

Well, some changes definitely would change how you think. Anything that produces hormones, for example, has a huge effect on your mental state. Somebody without a normal source of adrenaline or estrogen or testosterone, for example, would probably come across as cold or maybe even alien to normal people. And even if you replace the glands with timed releases or synthesize an equivalent the release would be performed by machines instead of natural functions and so probably wouldn't quite match up to normal people's responses. And that in turn would have a psychological effect when a previously sexually active person, after losing their reproductive organs, doesn't feel aroused when they feel they should or when you see something exciting or terrifying and your heart refuses to race. I suspect that the effects would be similar to those described by eunuchs, but to a wider range of stimuli.

As for the effects of simple limb replacement... I think that if the sensory data received and the capabilities of the limb are similar enough to baseline, the effects on the mind should be minimal (though I don't exactly have real world cases to examine). Any extra limbs or built-in tools will require the brain to make new pathways to control them properly, which will probably take months at least (based on what I've read on experiments on monkeys and robot arms) and likely change the way you see yourself. The biggest changes will probably be the ones that come with enhanced sensory capabilities; if your eyes can put up a personal HUD anywhere on anything? If you can freely zoom and change parts of the EM spectrum? That would seriously change the way you saw the world. For the better, I like to think, but again there's no way to know until we do it.

The biggest change to everyday life would likely be adding computers on the periphery of the brain, and that's the one that we can probably extrapolate from current observations. Almost all of us have probably noticed that when you use a computer a lot it becomes a sort of extension of your mind, assisting in recollection, helping you with math, etc. The ultimate extension of that would likely be one installed in your head, not interfering with the brain's function or replacing any of it, but letting you save data, displaying through cybereyes and other sensory implants... basically a laptop or a smartphone built into your skull, operated by signals directly from the brain and serving all the functions of a PDA but faster, more "naturally" and without any external hardware.

The downsides to this would probably be similar to every other advance in data storage and such. Your own ability to memorize things will likely decrease; this is a process that started with the invention or writing and has increased with every advancement in the availability of information. After all, why keep a whole oral tradition in your head if you can write it down and it will never be forgotten? Why memorize your whole calender when your laptop will track all that and remind you as needed? And now, why rely on your own memory of images and sounds when you can record everything you experience in the computer in your head to review later?
Next, the focus in education will probably move away even further from the memorization of data (if everybody has wikipedia in their heads already, what's the point?) and more on the analysis of it, being able to take data and extract meaning from it, and how to create new things and ideas.
Communication will likely get... weird. I'm already a hell of a lot more eloquent online than face to face, and I've seen people sitting at the same table texting to each other; if people get that kind of capability built into their heads will we abandon speech entirely, or reserve it for interacting with those not augmented? Or maybe only trusted friends will be allowed in for security purposes, with speech common between strangers and silent, instantaneous communication a sign of deep trust? What about data transfers? Will people stick to text on each others' HUDs or start tossing back and forth images and sound files? Maybe sharing entire memories with friends in some sort of weird cyberpunk telepathy thing?

Right, I'm going to stop blithering now. If any of this happens it's not going to be for several decades, and I might not even see it.

[Guest]

@Sindri
You saw that article I posted way back about rats communicating (in an extremely basic, proof-of-concept way) through a machine interface inside their brains earlier, right? Integrated machines are going to be very cool, whatever else they might be. I know that more permanent in-brain machines have problems with moving around and stuff, but with the rise of flexible electronics (including experiments with flexible batteries) I think that barrier might be broken sooner or later.

edit: link to the actual scientific article, which is what one always should be reading, I hear, rather than a journalist's summary.

[Frost]

Maybe it has something to do with my asexuality? Gender is a big part of self for most people, and reproductive capability is a major motivation or point of pride a lot of the time, even for those without immediate plans to use it. And from transexuals there are all manner of accounts of the body being wrong, and fixing the mechanics or at least the aesthetics of it having a huge beneficial effect... Maybe when somebody thinks of themself as a man or a woman the body is important, but when they think of themself as a mind wrapped in an organic machine there's no impact to switching parts of it for synthetics?
And of course I'm probably rare even among asexuals on that point. I'm sure there are a lot who identify as 'an asexual man' or 'an asexual woman' instead of just some vague neutral entity.

It may have something to do with that. I can't speak for anyone else, but you summed up my thoughts on the matter pretty exactly. If I had the option of getting "modules" and "upgrades", I'd do it in a heartbeat. I don't really think of myself as "an asexual dude" so much as "a person who happens to have male parts."

[Guest]

Woah. This is a thing that exists. Natural nuclear reactors? Yeah, I'd file that under "pretty cool."

[Frost]

I thought there already were natural reactors--fusion, in fact--that we all knew about. They're called "stars"

Sarcasm aside, yeah, that's pretty damn cool

[Harmony Ltd.]

I knew about those before they were cool. *hipster*

[StoneSlinger88]

There is much I think about during the day that does NOT need to be broadcast to everyone in the vicinity, so no implants for me.

[Frost]

I'm sure they wouldn't make broadcasting one's thoughts the default state

[Guest]

I'm sure they wouldn't make broadcasting one's thoughts the default state

Now that I think about it, I'm sure that they would. To advertisers, anyway. And they wouldn't tell you it even exists until some enterprising hacker figured it out, at which point they'd either A) kill him/her, B) sue him/her, or C) fake apologize and act like it's weird people were upset in the first place. Which option depends on how cyberpunk we make this future. =P

Seriously, though, if you want a picture of the future, imagine a Facebook, stamping on a human face, forever. How has Facebook treated privacy concerns, historically?

[Sindri]

I'm sure they wouldn't make broadcasting one's thoughts the default state

Now that I think about it, I'm sure that they would. To advertisers, anyway. And they wouldn't tell you it even exists until some enterprising hacker figured it out, at which point they'd either A) kill him/her, B) sue him/her, or C) fake apologize and act like it's weird people were upset in the first place. Which option depends on how cyberpunk we make this future. =P

Seriously, though, if you want a picture of the future, imagine a Facebook, stamping on a human face, forever. How has Facebook treated privacy concerns, historically?

Pft. They can try. And they might manage it on the rich idiots who need the shiniest toy and have no idea how it works. But Facebook isn't actually very good at anything; the only reason they can sell all your personal information is because you willingly told them all of your personal information and put it on public display. The people most interested in mind-machine interfaces are going to be the people who know how to work tech, and they simply won't roll over and accept whatever the corporate line is. Any company producing implants that cannot be used without compromising your own mind will not sell any implants.

In any case, it probably isn't even possible to just stream thoughts out. Images, sounds, words, sure. But that requires a person to coalesce the nebula of their thought process into some form of hard data, and then specifically send it out.

As for the advertisers, yeah, if you go through a city with a crappy firewall your vision would probably be filled with popups. But nothing here is making your brain into a computer, it's just streamlining the interface between the two a whole lot. Even the worst of malicious software won't be able to go into your thoughts and look around or change things, it could just screw with your sensory input and scan through whatever you've sent to external storage.

[Ironmonger]

I'd get some sort of multi-tool replacement for my left arm, or at least part of it. The most I use that hand for is grabbing objects, it doesn't have much dexterity and it's stiff, so it wouldn't be much of a loss as long as whatever prosthetic I got could feel.

[O. Hinds]

I knew about those before they were cool. *hipster*

Since when were they not cool? :)


(Also, I'm enjoying the cybernetics discussion, but I've nothing to add at the moment.)

[Ironmonger]

Random: I just remembered last night that I had... well, I don't exactly have nightmares, but I do have dreams in which bad stuff happens.
Anyway, the only thing I remember happening in it is that Kipper was made a mod... and I think it was camo who did it.
The fact that I don't remember anything about it other than that one thing makes it all the more hilarious to me XD

[Frost]

@Cybernetics
Sindri seems to be stealing the words out of my face-hole. He sums up my thoughts exactly.

Honestly, I'd be a bit wary of getting any sort of neural implants until they'd been made safe, cost-efficient, and idiot-proof. And long before that would happen, we'd see stuff like what Iron mentioned--limbs and such with different functions. Those, I'd jump on in a heartbeat.

[iLateralGX]

Random: I just remembered last night that I had... well, I don't exactly have nightmares, but I do have dreams in which bad stuff happens.
Anyway, the only thing I remember happening in it is that Kipper was made a mod... and I think it was camo who did it.
The fact that I don't remember anything about it other than that one thing makes it all the more hilarious to me XD

Like some sort of dystopian future where the forum rules have no meaning.. I like it.

[StoneSlinger88]

There is a guy up where I live that's a Vietnam vet. I believe he got hit by artillery, and lost every limb except one arm. However, he still manages to walk around, eat, pump gas, go to the store, and ride his motorcycle-- all with prosthetic limbs. Personally I'd prefer to keep my appendages, but the more advanced they make those things, the more I keep wanting to be Cyborg from Teen Titans.

[O. Hinds]

@Swicked:
Might I ask what the source of your new avatar is?

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