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Some Unused Worldbuilding
5 years ago
General
"Does aₘᵢₙ=2c²/Θ ? I don't know, but wouldn't it be fascinating if it were?"
I'm still poking away at the story I'm currently writing. I'm currently at the stage of feeling "this whole approach seems wrong, maybe I should give up on the current draft and start rewriting it from scratch" - but I've also got a few hints in the real-world the last couple of days that I'm in something of a depressive slump, so I know better than to believe what my brain is telling me. (I'm actually curious to see how well this year's interventions, which have been doing so well in general for chronic issues, will do against this moderately acute one.)
So! That all said, I've also just written a couple of paragraphs that I know I'm not going to insert into this story directly, but are still handy to know as a thing that exists in the setting. So, for your own enjoyment and inspiration, here they are:
"You're not familiar with POPs - Personality Overlay Programs? Hm. Lemme see. Okay. It mostly started, as so many things do, with video games. Say that you're a fairly ordinary human mind, and you find yourself in a virtual world where you're a colourful pony. If you plan on spending a lot of time there, you could train yourself up from scratch how to live in a quadruped body, how to flick your tail or flap your wings or whatever. Or you could get a bit of software assistance, to give you 90% or more of the experience with less than 1% of the effort. There are all sorts of tricks that can be used, and different software bundles use different ones. If you're an upload, with your brain being run as software, one of the more effective, if kind of creepy and intrusive, is to monitor what are called 'pre-conscious impulses'. For a lot of movements you make, it's possible to scan certain parts of your brain and tell what you're going to do, a whole second or more before you do them. Throw in some clever analyses and translations, and your thought of walking forward a few steps gets turned into the right muscle-signals to move your hooves properly. It gets a bit more surreal when the programs monitor your speech centres, and adjust your accent, vocabulary, and more on the fly, to help you talk the way a particular character would.
"All of that may be odd and uncomfortable for those to whom its new, like rock'n'roll or pen-and-paper role-playing games were in various decades; but of course that's not where it stops. People are people, and as soon as this tech was created, it was applied to the things people do - like power-exchange games, especially sexual ones. Something like Rule 34 applies - if there's a set of behaviours which gives anyone those funny feelings, there's a Personality Overlay Program to help maximize them. There are whole marketplaces with categories like 'Puppy', 'Daddy', 'Playboy Bunny', 'Foot Worshipper', 'Lesbian Slut', and so on. And countless arguments about the proprieties of giving someone else enough control over your software to impose the POP of their choice on you; which are mixed in with all the related control-based pieces of fetish-play, such as letting them control your avatar's form, the environment you're in, the NPCs inhabiting it, and so on. There are people who live the lifestyle to the extent of being in a world, and being a character of someone else's choice, full-time; and it's a smooth, unbroken continuity to people who just want a bit of help role-playing their favorite cartoon character a bit more accurately."
So! That all said, I've also just written a couple of paragraphs that I know I'm not going to insert into this story directly, but are still handy to know as a thing that exists in the setting. So, for your own enjoyment and inspiration, here they are:
"You're not familiar with POPs - Personality Overlay Programs? Hm. Lemme see. Okay. It mostly started, as so many things do, with video games. Say that you're a fairly ordinary human mind, and you find yourself in a virtual world where you're a colourful pony. If you plan on spending a lot of time there, you could train yourself up from scratch how to live in a quadruped body, how to flick your tail or flap your wings or whatever. Or you could get a bit of software assistance, to give you 90% or more of the experience with less than 1% of the effort. There are all sorts of tricks that can be used, and different software bundles use different ones. If you're an upload, with your brain being run as software, one of the more effective, if kind of creepy and intrusive, is to monitor what are called 'pre-conscious impulses'. For a lot of movements you make, it's possible to scan certain parts of your brain and tell what you're going to do, a whole second or more before you do them. Throw in some clever analyses and translations, and your thought of walking forward a few steps gets turned into the right muscle-signals to move your hooves properly. It gets a bit more surreal when the programs monitor your speech centres, and adjust your accent, vocabulary, and more on the fly, to help you talk the way a particular character would.
"All of that may be odd and uncomfortable for those to whom its new, like rock'n'roll or pen-and-paper role-playing games were in various decades; but of course that's not where it stops. People are people, and as soon as this tech was created, it was applied to the things people do - like power-exchange games, especially sexual ones. Something like Rule 34 applies - if there's a set of behaviours which gives anyone those funny feelings, there's a Personality Overlay Program to help maximize them. There are whole marketplaces with categories like 'Puppy', 'Daddy', 'Playboy Bunny', 'Foot Worshipper', 'Lesbian Slut', and so on. And countless arguments about the proprieties of giving someone else enough control over your software to impose the POP of their choice on you; which are mixed in with all the related control-based pieces of fetish-play, such as letting them control your avatar's form, the environment you're in, the NPCs inhabiting it, and so on. There are people who live the lifestyle to the extent of being in a world, and being a character of someone else's choice, full-time; and it's a smooth, unbroken continuity to people who just want a bit of help role-playing their favorite cartoon character a bit more accurately."
story is HFY type, First Contact. by Ralts bloodthorne.. https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/commen.....ce_cream_cone/ 'first' chapter in the story and a really good read. maybe some ideas can percolate out.
Not just states, too. Think of individuals who might consent to things that are just creepy. Churches pressuring their members to take 'faith aids' that instill them with conviction in their beliefs, loyalty to their church, and a general feeling of discomfort when interacting with outsiders. Children getting personality correcting neural work in the same way we prescribe drugs today.
This type of mind-altering technology is an invitation to dystopia. Perhaps a very well-behaved, crime-free dystopia. One where all the people are perfectly happy, because anyone who isn't happy receives 'treatment' to make them happy.
At present, my main solution is that, counter to many cyberpunk predictions, very few biological people want to go through the invasive neurological surgery required for the most extreme forms of POPs. Which mostly leaves such things to the various sorts of digital people: uploaded minds and AIs. And less-extreme filters for biological folk visiting VR, such as vocabulary filters.
I don't think it's likely that this type of tech wouldn't be developed, whether or not it's troublesome tech in the wrong hands. The human body and brain are physical objects and eventually we'll figure out how they work, and how to manipulate them utterly. I'm not sure how far into this development of tech DPR is writing right now, but I know they've gone all the way before. If you can upload a human mind into a computer, then you can alter a human mind even when it's not on a computer.
It'll be a very 'interesting' future when we have this tech, to be sure. It will indeed be possible to instill absolute loyalty and faith to a cause against a person's will. True mind control. But, I imagine the bigger changes you want to make, the longer it'll take to work through. And you'll probably need a combination of external machinery and at least cell sized machines, if not true nanomachines, so you wouldn't likely be doing this in the street.
You could probably do it with a home computer, some pills, and a full dive VR kit though.
It's not something we can just ban research on and expect that to stick, imo. This is pretty much inevetable, if we don't destroy ourselves. Eventually whether by governments or private individuals, the secrets of the human brain will be unlocked. It's one of the few paths we have towards near-immortality, so I don't think people will be able to resist it.
But, we have other concerns too. Mere 'drugs' offer a mild high compared to wireheading. The original meaning of that was to electrostimulate the pleasure centres of the brain with an actual physical wire. It should be possible to do that and more with cell-scale machinery injected into the brain, or even consumed as food or 'caught' like a disease.
It may be possible to make your body last forever, or very close to it, and set your brain to give you perfect pleasure forever. You're basically a fancy rock at that point, just doing nothing while blissing out forever.
There are lots of scary things in our future. I look forward to facing them bravely.
Is it unethical to change the way *I* perceive you from your chosen form?
Towards the end one of the characters is charged with a sex crime - illegal seduction coaching - and placed on the sex offenders register - immediately adding him to the global blacklist to which everyone is subscribed by default. Everyone he looks at, he sees only an outline, and their voices are muffled. Everyone who looks at him sees a bright red outline warning that he is dangerous, and his voice is distorted likewise. The program implies that he will be unable to communicate with any other person for the rest of his life. Notably the police officer responsible for the arrest deliberately lets him go free on a much serious charge in order to get the sex crime conviction, because he knows that life imprisonment would be a far more humane punishment, and his own vindictive sense of justice compels him to see criminals punished in the harshest manner he can wrangle from the legal system. This goes so far as modifying a mind-simulation engine intended for interrogation purposes to instead create a conscious copy and subject it to around 700,000 years of continuous subjective time confined to a single room.
A major theme of Black Mirror is that technology enables the most sadistic aspects of human behavior just as much as it enables the most benevolent. It amplifies the power to make the world a better place - but also the power to make it far worse. In this case, the impulse to cast a moral judgement upon the behavior of others and see them punished can easily turn into a brutally sadistic need to see pain beyond all reason inflicted upon those perceived of doing wrong. We can see plenty of that today - just look at the design of many prison systems, and how the public care so little about prison rape that it's a subject of stock humor. Create a technology that can serve as a super-torture-chamber, and a lot of people are going to relish the chance to prove what a good person they are by putting some bad people in it.