![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mc776I hope one day you will
forgive me.
The Swarm is a vast, complex, self-correcting set of algorithms executed over the network that takes everyone's opinion on something and crunches it all together into a (usually, hopefully) unified whole that represents the democratic voice.
When people consult the Swarm, they access the network and enter 2 or more questions, each question written by one of the parties immediately involved in the discussion and the order of which is shuffled and the sequences randomly distributed among the viewers. All cameras watching the persons involved relay the last few minutes of footage along with the question, or if the parties are communicating over the network, the last 3000 words of the discussion. A 15-minute break is called and everyone available is expected to comment anonymously to the Swarm; if enough commenters request more time, more time is granted, but still giving a preliminary first-impression opinion is considered "polite" (as far as that concept may apply to faceless network commenting). It is also safe, as requests for more time are seldom granted, or more accurately seldom ultimately requested.
Anyone with the hardware to run it can install a new Swarm. Many specialized communities have a Swarm that only takes information from people in that group, or from that group plus whatever it could mine from other similar groups. Some people can even install an ad hoc Swarm to settle a discussion between 2 people, but the result is usually less than satisfactory (or comprehensible).
Some corporate lobbyists have been trying to get a clampdown on "free" Swarms for years, insisting that such practices be regulated to approved professional providers such as their client entertainment and security firms, but the vast proliferation of Swarms both general and specialized has been such a useful data collection source for marketing and government surveillance that these efforts are generally allowed to be crushed by grassroots opposition (many of whom express their grievances through the lobbying firms' own Swarms).
(Who programs the Swarm? Best not to think too hard on that.)
In other news, the following thought just went through my mind while checking the dominant spelling of a word: "Google was quite happy to give me those results." (emphasis on "those")
Between watching Revolution and being reminded of Last And First Men, my mind's been on the subject of our future evolution, with one specific constraint: if we're going to survive enough generations from now for any non-trivial evolution to happen, the primary short-term evolutionary pressure will be the utter destruction of our biosphere.
Collapse all fishery stocks. All coastal towns are ports, there for something else (tidal energy, mining), or dying.
Massive global warming. Big money in tidal and wind farms and wind farm insurance with all the additional energy in the air. Snowstorms, flooding frequent.
Loss of wildlife means no one can live off the land anymore. Food is centralized. New global feudalism with agri-business megacorps instead of familial dynasties.
Continued lobbying and concentration of wealth result in obsolescence of nation state. Presidents and parliaments would be romanticized like kings and shamans today.
Increasing centralization of power may paradoxically be key to getting us to stop short of self-destruction, with no commons for a tragedy to play out when only one entity owns everything. Similarly, after a few centuries of increasingly brutal shareholder, subsidiary and employee conflicts, proper, comprehensive government may be restored, perhaps inspired by its predecessors the way ours looked to Rome.
Metal, especially rare earth metals, will become scarce. Digging through scraps of the ruined coastal towns may be more trouble than its worth, without sufficiently cheap labour. Cue impoverished children massed in the ruins, willing to extract all manner of material for food.
That said, the destruction of ecosystems may open up much space for exploration where there is no longer really anything worth protecting.
Food production will continue to improve. More 3-dimensional development to prevent waste (if only because fertilizer runoff costs money) meaning more things growing on sides of buildings in addition to simply growing things hydroponically indoors (and spending yet even more fuel on lighting). Penthouses will have plantations; crops growing on dangerous, windy ledges will be gathered by indentured workers from the ruins and the undercities, safely muzzled to remove the temptation of eating the product.
Exploding population might actually favour greater brain capacity, as anyone who cannot bear to keep a social and emotional tab on an increasing number of people in increasing proximity will develop all sorts of withdrawal, anxiety and depression and thus weed themselves out.
Increased visibility of Others may fuel ideological impetus to outbreed them.
(Selection for aggression and social dominance will likely not change much from any other time in human history, between pressure to assert self and need not to be punished by those who could not be fought.)
Arcologies will develop not as any grand plan, but the natural evolution of building design as there is less and less reason to step out of the air-conditioned, gardened buildings and into the stormy muck and brambles outside. Giant ragweeds and giant molds and the giant rats that eat them, and the scavenging bedbug swarms that provide protein for rugged but chronically diseased outlanders the world over, and the culture of crows that serve as the common man's last messengers from the world beyond, are beyond the scope of this brainstorm.
The outlanders are fertile by age 8. There is precious little time before the cancer you're born with kills you. They are generally far more literate than the "real" people in the arcologies, and groups of them have developed elaborate mythologies and rituals around the endless archives of self-help books that were published in the past centuries. They are hunted for sport and kept as (gibbering, fuckable) pets by miners and explorers (both resource explorers and rich adventurers looking to "understand their primordial roots" or whatever).
Oil unlikely to run out before other resources do : metals, conductive materials. Complex electronics may become much rarer and maintenance work on communal devices handed out as rewards or as ransom. Non-invasive neural interface research continues; even in this age no one trusts the Company enough to agree to surgery (though ingested carbon nanobot "focus supplements" are another matter entirely).
Technology develops and certain standards are developed for those "focus supplements". They are slightly toxic and trigger an allergic reaction in some. Rival "companies" (actual legal incorporation being subject to rigorous standards of conduct that preclude such action) set up alternatives that work with the current tech. More disputes, more tech wars, but this time with a genetic slant as some people really are better built to accommodate one lineage of nanobot tech over another. Self-replicating "focus supplements" are invented and widely denounced as an atrocity.
Occasionally a defective supplement may result in chronic physiological and mental problems as the nanobots are inextricably mixed into the central nervous system; this is accepted as an unfortunate fact of life, along with premature aging from incompatibilities between various types and versions after ingesting many supplements over the years.
Chickens are bred for ability to lay eggs without shells and live without (or at least with severely damaged or deformed) brain and beak. When butchered, the soggy, flaccid mess is liquefied, mixed with nutrient supplements and flavouring, then distilled and spun into fibers to simulate muscle. For many it is a luxury food, a ritual throwback to man's fabled carnivorous, wild past.
At some point someone at the Company figures we should relieve the consumer of the bother of drinking the supplement separately and just put it into all the food they sell. This is widely praised as a cost-cutting exercise and mostly unannounced. Several parasite epidemics are eliminated by simply adding something poisonous to them in the affected community's food supply.
Other parasites adapt to the nanobots and become part of the neural interface. This sort of chaos quickly becomes understood to be normal.
Living in your own space becomes even less conceivable as people are generally expected to help reboot a fellow human being if they were to suddenly crash and die in the middle of an exchange, lest any delay - and decay - cause irreparable tissue damage.
Bigger brains means more risk in childbirth. Loyalty to the Company may be necessary to prevent a stillbirth or to preserve the life of the mother.
This should all come to pass long before the oil runs out.
Selective pressures increased:
- non-violent displays of dominance in things not directly relevant to
material survival
- social "carrying capacity"
- hardware/wetware compatibility
- parasite tolerance
- radiation tolerance (from exposure to equipment)
- burst strength (for emergencies, fights)
- extraversion
- memory
- loyalty to abstract concepts
- 3-dimensional navigation
- ability to specialize in a skillset
- physical height (to reach objects, stand out in crowds)
- shedding of various bodily defence mechanisms (when proper medical
care is always only a few minutes (and a few more onerous lifetime
contracts with the Company) away)
- ability to heal lots and lots of microtrauma to the central nervous system
Selective pressures reduced:
- running endurance
- fat storage
- long-distance vision
The process would facilitate the development of a very collectively-minded, myopic (possibly in both senses) people who may not ever be able to run a marathon but who may be much more aware of what is above or below them than we are and could probably have a much easier time carrying on a conversation.
And then the oil runs out. This will not be sudden; there will be generations of increased difficulty of extraction and unpredictability of supply, and alternative sources will mostly have become mature tech, but it would still drastically reduce the available energy in a few generations.
What would that energy be used for?
- food
- transport
- lighting
-heat cooling
- communications
- luxury goods
Denarius for a loaf and don't spill the wine. Viewed from the top, best things to cut are communications from commoners to the Company hierarchy, then cooling and transport for the expendables. There will be deaths and rebellions but almost certainly nothing enough to topple the hierarchy - unless a schism forms within that hierarchy at just the right time. Then there would be war.
The war would be total since retreating to outlands = death. The arcology, if it managed to last this long, is likely too big to be structurally affected. Long and drearily violent story short, there will be enough left at the end of it for people to continue living in there, and eventually restore some if not even close to all of the prior infrastructure. It could be that much prior art will be lost; more likely whoever was stronger to begin with will win, preserve much of the old knowledge, and use the destruction as an opportunity to cement their hold on the populace and replace a good deal of obsolete hardware in the building.
Depending on how it is done, this could cement the role of the nanobots even further, which in the chaos of the war many people may have fitted with self-replicating ones to prepare against supply shortages.
One thing is sure, however: when a quarter to half of the population is wiped out, there will be a lot more space.
Selective pressures increased:
- hardware/wetware compatibility
- parasite tolerance
- radiation tolerance (from exposure to equipment)
- burst strength (for emergencies, fights)
- 3-dimensional navigation
- ability to heal lots and lots of microtrauma to the central nervous system
- fat storage
- long-distance vision
- climbing endurance
- ability to recover from major neural "overload" attacks delivered
through a network
- ability to absorb information into long term memory (old memories
likely being frequently wiped out in the healing process)
- resistance to disease, toxins from consuming recycled dead
Selective pressures reduced:
- loyalty to abstract concepts
- social "carrying capacity"
- extraversion
- ability to specialize in a skillset
- physical height
- shedding of various bodily defence mechanisms
Still nothing motivating a dramatic, fundamental change, while yet even this cannot possibly last forever.
I may revisit this later on.
forgive me.
The Swarm is a vast, complex, self-correcting set of algorithms executed over the network that takes everyone's opinion on something and crunches it all together into a (usually, hopefully) unified whole that represents the democratic voice.
When people consult the Swarm, they access the network and enter 2 or more questions, each question written by one of the parties immediately involved in the discussion and the order of which is shuffled and the sequences randomly distributed among the viewers. All cameras watching the persons involved relay the last few minutes of footage along with the question, or if the parties are communicating over the network, the last 3000 words of the discussion. A 15-minute break is called and everyone available is expected to comment anonymously to the Swarm; if enough commenters request more time, more time is granted, but still giving a preliminary first-impression opinion is considered "polite" (as far as that concept may apply to faceless network commenting). It is also safe, as requests for more time are seldom granted, or more accurately seldom ultimately requested.
Anyone with the hardware to run it can install a new Swarm. Many specialized communities have a Swarm that only takes information from people in that group, or from that group plus whatever it could mine from other similar groups. Some people can even install an ad hoc Swarm to settle a discussion between 2 people, but the result is usually less than satisfactory (or comprehensible).
Some corporate lobbyists have been trying to get a clampdown on "free" Swarms for years, insisting that such practices be regulated to approved professional providers such as their client entertainment and security firms, but the vast proliferation of Swarms both general and specialized has been such a useful data collection source for marketing and government surveillance that these efforts are generally allowed to be crushed by grassroots opposition (many of whom express their grievances through the lobbying firms' own Swarms).
(Who programs the Swarm? Best not to think too hard on that.)
In other news, the following thought just went through my mind while checking the dominant spelling of a word: "Google was quite happy to give me those results." (emphasis on "those")
Between watching Revolution and being reminded of Last And First Men, my mind's been on the subject of our future evolution, with one specific constraint: if we're going to survive enough generations from now for any non-trivial evolution to happen, the primary short-term evolutionary pressure will be the utter destruction of our biosphere.
Collapse all fishery stocks. All coastal towns are ports, there for something else (tidal energy, mining), or dying.
Massive global warming. Big money in tidal and wind farms and wind farm insurance with all the additional energy in the air. Snowstorms, flooding frequent.
Loss of wildlife means no one can live off the land anymore. Food is centralized. New global feudalism with agri-business megacorps instead of familial dynasties.
Continued lobbying and concentration of wealth result in obsolescence of nation state. Presidents and parliaments would be romanticized like kings and shamans today.
Increasing centralization of power may paradoxically be key to getting us to stop short of self-destruction, with no commons for a tragedy to play out when only one entity owns everything. Similarly, after a few centuries of increasingly brutal shareholder, subsidiary and employee conflicts, proper, comprehensive government may be restored, perhaps inspired by its predecessors the way ours looked to Rome.
Metal, especially rare earth metals, will become scarce. Digging through scraps of the ruined coastal towns may be more trouble than its worth, without sufficiently cheap labour. Cue impoverished children massed in the ruins, willing to extract all manner of material for food.
That said, the destruction of ecosystems may open up much space for exploration where there is no longer really anything worth protecting.
Food production will continue to improve. More 3-dimensional development to prevent waste (if only because fertilizer runoff costs money) meaning more things growing on sides of buildings in addition to simply growing things hydroponically indoors (and spending yet even more fuel on lighting). Penthouses will have plantations; crops growing on dangerous, windy ledges will be gathered by indentured workers from the ruins and the undercities, safely muzzled to remove the temptation of eating the product.
Exploding population might actually favour greater brain capacity, as anyone who cannot bear to keep a social and emotional tab on an increasing number of people in increasing proximity will develop all sorts of withdrawal, anxiety and depression and thus weed themselves out.
Increased visibility of Others may fuel ideological impetus to outbreed them.
(Selection for aggression and social dominance will likely not change much from any other time in human history, between pressure to assert self and need not to be punished by those who could not be fought.)
Arcologies will develop not as any grand plan, but the natural evolution of building design as there is less and less reason to step out of the air-conditioned, gardened buildings and into the stormy muck and brambles outside. Giant ragweeds and giant molds and the giant rats that eat them, and the scavenging bedbug swarms that provide protein for rugged but chronically diseased outlanders the world over, and the culture of crows that serve as the common man's last messengers from the world beyond, are beyond the scope of this brainstorm.
The outlanders are fertile by age 8. There is precious little time before the cancer you're born with kills you. They are generally far more literate than the "real" people in the arcologies, and groups of them have developed elaborate mythologies and rituals around the endless archives of self-help books that were published in the past centuries. They are hunted for sport and kept as (gibbering, fuckable) pets by miners and explorers (both resource explorers and rich adventurers looking to "understand their primordial roots" or whatever).
Oil unlikely to run out before other resources do : metals, conductive materials. Complex electronics may become much rarer and maintenance work on communal devices handed out as rewards or as ransom. Non-invasive neural interface research continues; even in this age no one trusts the Company enough to agree to surgery (though ingested carbon nanobot "focus supplements" are another matter entirely).
Technology develops and certain standards are developed for those "focus supplements". They are slightly toxic and trigger an allergic reaction in some. Rival "companies" (actual legal incorporation being subject to rigorous standards of conduct that preclude such action) set up alternatives that work with the current tech. More disputes, more tech wars, but this time with a genetic slant as some people really are better built to accommodate one lineage of nanobot tech over another. Self-replicating "focus supplements" are invented and widely denounced as an atrocity.
Occasionally a defective supplement may result in chronic physiological and mental problems as the nanobots are inextricably mixed into the central nervous system; this is accepted as an unfortunate fact of life, along with premature aging from incompatibilities between various types and versions after ingesting many supplements over the years.
Chickens are bred for ability to lay eggs without shells and live without (or at least with severely damaged or deformed) brain and beak. When butchered, the soggy, flaccid mess is liquefied, mixed with nutrient supplements and flavouring, then distilled and spun into fibers to simulate muscle. For many it is a luxury food, a ritual throwback to man's fabled carnivorous, wild past.
At some point someone at the Company figures we should relieve the consumer of the bother of drinking the supplement separately and just put it into all the food they sell. This is widely praised as a cost-cutting exercise and mostly unannounced. Several parasite epidemics are eliminated by simply adding something poisonous to them in the affected community's food supply.
Other parasites adapt to the nanobots and become part of the neural interface. This sort of chaos quickly becomes understood to be normal.
Living in your own space becomes even less conceivable as people are generally expected to help reboot a fellow human being if they were to suddenly crash and die in the middle of an exchange, lest any delay - and decay - cause irreparable tissue damage.
Bigger brains means more risk in childbirth. Loyalty to the Company may be necessary to prevent a stillbirth or to preserve the life of the mother.
This should all come to pass long before the oil runs out.
Selective pressures increased:
- non-violent displays of dominance in things not directly relevant to
material survival
- social "carrying capacity"
- hardware/wetware compatibility
- parasite tolerance
- radiation tolerance (from exposure to equipment)
- burst strength (for emergencies, fights)
- extraversion
- memory
- loyalty to abstract concepts
- 3-dimensional navigation
- ability to specialize in a skillset
- physical height (to reach objects, stand out in crowds)
- shedding of various bodily defence mechanisms (when proper medical
care is always only a few minutes (and a few more onerous lifetime
contracts with the Company) away)
- ability to heal lots and lots of microtrauma to the central nervous system
Selective pressures reduced:
- running endurance
- fat storage
- long-distance vision
The process would facilitate the development of a very collectively-minded, myopic (possibly in both senses) people who may not ever be able to run a marathon but who may be much more aware of what is above or below them than we are and could probably have a much easier time carrying on a conversation.
And then the oil runs out. This will not be sudden; there will be generations of increased difficulty of extraction and unpredictability of supply, and alternative sources will mostly have become mature tech, but it would still drastically reduce the available energy in a few generations.
What would that energy be used for?
- food
- transport
- lighting
-
- communications
- luxury goods
Denarius for a loaf and don't spill the wine. Viewed from the top, best things to cut are communications from commoners to the Company hierarchy, then cooling and transport for the expendables. There will be deaths and rebellions but almost certainly nothing enough to topple the hierarchy - unless a schism forms within that hierarchy at just the right time. Then there would be war.
The war would be total since retreating to outlands = death. The arcology, if it managed to last this long, is likely too big to be structurally affected. Long and drearily violent story short, there will be enough left at the end of it for people to continue living in there, and eventually restore some if not even close to all of the prior infrastructure. It could be that much prior art will be lost; more likely whoever was stronger to begin with will win, preserve much of the old knowledge, and use the destruction as an opportunity to cement their hold on the populace and replace a good deal of obsolete hardware in the building.
Depending on how it is done, this could cement the role of the nanobots even further, which in the chaos of the war many people may have fitted with self-replicating ones to prepare against supply shortages.
One thing is sure, however: when a quarter to half of the population is wiped out, there will be a lot more space.
Selective pressures increased:
- hardware/wetware compatibility
- parasite tolerance
- radiation tolerance (from exposure to equipment)
- burst strength (for emergencies, fights)
- 3-dimensional navigation
- ability to heal lots and lots of microtrauma to the central nervous system
- fat storage
- long-distance vision
- climbing endurance
- ability to recover from major neural "overload" attacks delivered
through a network
- ability to absorb information into long term memory (old memories
likely being frequently wiped out in the healing process)
- resistance to disease, toxins from consuming recycled dead
Selective pressures reduced:
- loyalty to abstract concepts
- social "carrying capacity"
- extraversion
- ability to specialize in a skillset
- physical height
- shedding of various bodily defence mechanisms
Still nothing motivating a dramatic, fundamental change, while yet even this cannot possibly last forever.
I may revisit this later on.
(no subject)
Date: April 23rd, 2013 12:45 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: March 19th, 2018 22:56 (UTC)