Considering technological advancement in sci-fi games, developers always add plasma guns, energy weapons, etc. However in RPGs players have more time to explore and investigate worlds. This leads to some interesting facts : What will in sociological sense evolve or advance? I've had this conversation with my friend and funny thought suddenly exploded. In 500 years considering biotechnological advancement, will humans go to bathrooms? Quite interesting thought. Where should change begin? - Evolution of mass transit : Reducing personal travel to rare in big, planned cities. - Fast food : Faster than you think. - Food : Helthier than ever and also it never tasted better. - Communication devices : holographic as in Minority Report - Clothes : changes texture, animated logo - Plants : Everywhere - Dust : history book, page 341. - etc. I beleive that overall design of future society must be in line with techonological advancement. You want to have pet? Not robotic, androidal. Evolving our way of life? Absolutely. It is quite hard to imagine where we'll be in 5 years not to imagine 500 years but that's what artists are for. Any thoughts, suggestions.

I have a feeling that some of the major changes that will happen are in the robotics/AI and direct human/computer interactions field. Those will completely change society. I was talking to a friend last night about the effects and effictiveness of capitalism in the future. As robots replace more and more humans in teh workforce, there will have to be a way to keep a balance without the rich becoming the only 'civilized' people on the planet. The rich are just getting richer and richer and they are getting richer faster. The future technology will only make this worse. I think that about the only way around this is to build small self-sustaining comunities (Earth or space or moon or w/e) where no humans have to work, everyone simply ejoys their lives and chills all day. The robots work to make the stuff we need, and work to make the stuff they make even better. [quick rant] People who are scared of the typical sci/fi robots take over thing simply assume that robots which are smart enough to replace humans will have a top priority of self-survival. Self-survival is simply evolved into us, which is why we assume all inteligent life forms contain it. If we give robots the top priority to make humans happy, and make their worst nightmare the exintiction and/or drastic change in humans, they aren't going to go killing all of us...[/quick rant]

Anyway, our economy is getting much more efficient, yet our society isnt changing to keep up with this. As the economy become super-efficient in the way future, capitalism will break down assuming the goal is to keep every person happy...

The combination of direct interaction between brain and computer along with super smart AI means that humans will be able to buy an extra IQ. They could upgrade their memory, get a new processor, back themselves up, etc. Im hoping that when this happens, we will have grown smart enough to figure out what's best.

Dwiel

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[quick rant] People who are scared of the typical sci/fi robots take over thing simply assume that robots which are smart enough to replace humans will have a top priority of self-survival. Self-survival is simply evolved into us, which is why we assume all inteligent life forms contain it. If we give robots the top priority to make humans happy, and make their worst nightmare the exintiction and/or drastic change in humans, they aren't going to go killing all of us...[/quick rant]

Have you read any Asimov? Or even seen the I Robot movie? Even with quite well thought out safety features issues could easily arise, especially over time.

I'd agree that keeping the setting of a game (or movie for that matter) inline with probable technological advancement can be a great way to create a someone believable and immersive setting, but its also worth noting that almost anything could occur to interfere with that technological path in the meantime, allowing for drastically different worlds than expected. And sometimes its just more fun to be a little less realistic.

Then there's Greg Egan's work - you get humans who don't have a physical body, humans who live in robot bodies, humans who decide to retain biology, exploration of new dimensional spaces, femtotechnology, light-based processors that reconfigure themselves on the fly, exploration of the universe by many copies of the same virtual person, islands built out of biotech wonders, and that's just staying with the stuff which seems relatively possible.

Try Egan, Vernor Vinge, Charles Stross, Ray Kurzweil for edge-of-the-possible material. They're pretty much hard SF authors through and through, telling not only HOW the revolution will come, but when and why as well.

First, the whole "AI takes over and kills us all" theory has one big gap. Why would we create an independent AI in the first place?

I can see the point in creating limited AI's for specific computing purposes, but what would we need an independent intelligent being for? No factory is going to use a horde of intelligent robots to do the work, when they can get by at least as efficiently with non-intelligent ones, who doesn't question orders and who doesn't try to do things independantly of everything else.

Only reason I could see would be for "pets" or something similar. Will there be enough of these pets to take over the world? Maybe, maybe not, but they sure as hell won't get much assistance from dumb agricultural robots, or machinery working away at car factories... ;)

And why would all AI's follow the same ideas? Why would they all join up to kill us? I can see a few of them deciding to clean the world of these ugly humans, but all of them? Isn't the point about (artificial) intelligence that they're able to make independant decisions?

Another question that comes to mind, is why do you assume that everything becomes better in the future? Ffx mentioned mass transit. Does that really look like it's progressing much today? Or would it disappear in 500 years time?

Hae you seen Blade Runner, the movie directed by Ridley Scott based on the novel Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? It presents a unique perception of the future, that being a globalization such that the bulk population of california is chinese, and style has become cyclic, that in fact everyone is dressed as though it were somewhere between 1900 and 1920. Plus, for a 1980's movie, the scifi itself was interesting. "Replicants" rather then "Clones" or "Robots". An insinuation that its an artificial biological life form.

I liked it.

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Original post by Spoonster First, the whole "AI takes over and kills us all" theory has one big gap. Why would we create an independent AI in the first place?

Because we can. More has been done for worse reasons.

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Original post by liquiddark Then there's Greg Egan's work - you get humans who don't have a physical body, humans who live in robot bodies, humans who decide to retain biology, exploration of new dimensional spaces, femtotechnology, light-based processors that reconfigure themselves on the fly, exploration of the universe by many copies of the same virtual person, islands built out of biotech wonders, and that's just staying with the stuff which seems relatively possible.

If you were to recommend one and only one of his books, which one would it be?

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Because we can. [www.ai.mit.edu] More has been done for worse reasons.

Yes thats true, all for science.

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Hae you seen Blade Runner, the movie directed by Ridley Scott based on the novel Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? It presents a unique perception of the future, that being a globalization such that the bulk population of california is chinese, and style has become cyclic, that in fact everyone is dressed as though it were somewhere between 1900 and 1920. Plus, for a 1980's movie, the scifi itself was interesting. "Replicants" rather then "Clones" or "Robots". An insinuation that its an artificial biological life form.

I liked it.



That won't happen. Have you read Ray Kurzweil's articles on singularity which states that future progress is incomprehensible (Why am I going against my own word here trying to understand future?)

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Then there's Greg Egan's work - you get humans who don't have a physical body, humans who live in robot bodies, humans who decide to retain biology, exploration of new dimensional spaces, femtotechnology, light-based processors that reconfigure themselves on the fly, exploration of the universe by many copies of the same virtual person, islands built out of biotech wonders, and that's just staying with the stuff which seems relatively possible.

I don't beleive that our brain is compatible with anything in this universe but hey, science fiction has no limits. If it does, it wouldn't be fiction it would be faction. You can even throw ethical, moral and philosophical issues there aswell.

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I'd agree that keeping the setting of a game (or movie for that matter) inline with probable technological advancement can be a great way to create a someone believable and immersive setting, but its also worth noting that almost anything could occur to interfere with that technological path in the meantime, allowing for drastically different worlds than expected. And sometimes its just more fun to be a little less realistic.

That's what I'm trying to do. Keep up design of the game to some future period. So far, only Minority report, IMHO, offered nicely designed future society.

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Original post by CoffeeMug If you were to recommend one and only one of his books, which one would it be?

Luminous. It's a short story collection, and it's comprehensible. In terms of hard SF, tho, Diaspora. It goes to the limit of the possible in pure physics-based hard SF terms. And it's like reading a physics textbook unless you really like that kind of thing (which I, fortunately, do).