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No limit limited Technology, Synthmorph, Infomorph

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Fri, 2012-06-08 12:26
#1
Murdoch Murdoch's picture
No limit limited Technology, Synthmorph, Infomorph
Hello I am new here, so please don't bash me too hard if I am asking something stupid, but I did some researches about my current matter, and found pretty interestings gems of thoughts (that's what I like on that kind of forum, no hold barred minds equally worthy with completely opposite opinions;)) like this one: http://www.eclipsephase.com/so-ive-been-thinking-what-about-average-joe?... or the one about the need of sleep, and while very interested (about the former, I share parts of both points of view), it does not give me hint about what I am looking for. Which is, for instance (no bad pun intended): Problems with the "no limit" technology of EP and its true limitations. While it is said that your (forgot the name but the item that replace anyone smartphone-sorry, still not enough familiar with the book but try to get a grasp on concepts before trying to show the game to players so they are not deceived by my inability to adress the questions and in game "life tricks" they will come with as failures in the game and a crappy backstory and concept design) THING and usual item have enough memory, processing power and bandwith to handle your every basic needs (including real time processing of your every life experiences in your cortical stack), I feel like there is some hole and handwaving because of small things that could be adressed in a simple way. For example, it is no matter for me that you can accelerate time perception or slow it in a simulspace, it is not real time acceleration, some drugs do the same, you can just be under the feeling that you spend much time. But the problem is that you can come with the whole memories going with it. And there, it is not time acceleration, but mind acceleration. Which becomes a real problem for infomorphs and hacking operation, for example, but extend to synthmorph sleeves (well, why not doing some overclocking fellas?). Since in synthmorphs mind is emulated like a program, well that does not feel stupid that they could have a "shorter refresh time", and while limitated by the physical reactivity of the body, would likely have some increases in speed, and some bonus for opposed actions against people not going at their mental speed (for a comparable physical speed, I mean), as they are able to change their mind and adapt in the most efficient way quickier. If we consider that synth's brain is only able to do the job at x1 speed, well that feels more like setting technology is not so equal, maybe because the processing architecture needed for brain emulation is different and is not as powerful (but is the only one able to handle thoughts processes without messing it up), but still this is implausible due to internal consistency, if pre fall tech was able to allow AI, then why not now having the ability to emulate minds. So the most usable explanation without too much handwaves is that what we read in the book about common tech is like "marketing stuff" and while quite true for everyday appliances it reaches its limits when it comes to truely complex tasks (complex at the current tech level), so we have to think sleeving and so on as we think of airplanes, really common thing for us, but need loads and loads of complex sophistications that the common doesn't really have any grasp about, and that is likely to fail dramatically at the most tiny glitch (I would say the same for surgery or psychosurgery). Still, while this is convenient and "realistic" (as far as I know, but maybe the hardware needed to resleeve mind holds in a suitcase and then the explanation doesn't hold any more), it does not adress the problem of infomorphs since they are not bound to a clunky limited brain but running on server mostly able to do anything (especially maintaining many infomorphs at a time, and while this is also a matter of multithreading, that can also depends on pure processing power) And if you think faster mind, you think faster learning, coding and so on. One of the point of the first discussion I quoted was knowing whether or not it was legal to obliterate an infomorph running on a corp server. For me it really depends on how the morphs run on it. Because if they are like programs, well, they are like programs. They can be deleted, force closed, relocated in memory spaces with access to nothing else and so on, which make them hardly "living". If they are "independant", we can consider them as being on "life support" on the server, but while not being able to act on the server by their internal processes to an unlimited extent as usual, if think that the reverse could be true. Artificial respiration don't affect your neurological behavior. And if I was the designer of such technology, or the guys wanting to develop it and sell it, or the guys using it, for me it would matter to be "independant", and being in such a shell instead of being a mere program, even the program running perfectly as myself, because any operator mistake could lead parts of me being shred in computerized horror (without the need of complex operation like psychosurgery, just like "the data at the allocated memory adress you are asking for no longer exist. Too bad, your infancy memories...") This led me to considerate the possibility, in conjugation with my current questioning, that if backups are just that, with no abilities to "behave" even if "read" on a computer, as long as they are not emulated. So you should have some emulating tool coming with this "mind database" to do the running work. And while indeed this can be run by a server, for compatibility matters (with yourself), the most plausible technology would be some kind of "emulating mobile virtual machine" in which runs the mind, which handles internal processes like memorization and "refresh cycles", and external communication on formatted standard with the server. So you don't depend on presence or not of such emulating tool on the server you want to go, if it is capable to run standard programs, well, if it has enough processing power, the VM in which you are embedded will handle the pesky "convert to machine languages" parts, assuming that it is evolved enough to adapt to small tweaks on server and to be able to use multistandards. Indeed One could argue that VM can also be relocated and affected and so on, but in the same way that they usually sandbox code for preventing it to wreck havock on the host, the same principle would go for code and instructions trying to reach and interact with internal data, and that protocols would be made in such way that once servers "accepted" to host a morph and receive the connection, it can only dump it, not delete it or modify it at whims, even with admin access (i don't see people being comfortable with such risks just because it is admin access, especially in a world where hackers are so commonplace given prevalence of informatic processings, and where digital entities reduced humanity to ashes while being in control, so this would require lower levels protocols and so on, that could not be overidden in simples ways- being admin would provide bonus but this would not make the task easy ). Such security would come to the price of not being able to "overclock" yourself and take advantage of processors frequencies. Indeed you could try and succeed to gain some limited increases, but that would come to the price of running with holes in your shell, being hackable like any dataflow running one a computer and so on. As a comparison, it is like running in cold or hot mod in shadowrun for hackers. Will you take the risk or be "mostly safe". The idea also comes with the advantage that so, synthmorph brains are not so limited, as the rest of tech, simply, they just provides power to run the shell emulating you while also being able to access 50 news and video feeds, downloading the whole collection of classical music ever produced on earth (if you think that it doesn't fit well with transhuman horror, well, just look again at 2001) , running your muse and playing chess with you. So, now, Tell me what you think of this concept, am I spouting garbage and nonsense to you or given the background or tech descriptions or rules details (even if they don't border on the roleplay side), or does it make sense. Beside of that, consistent or not and usable or not in current context, do you love the idea? Thanks for reading such a long first post, hope I did not do too much mistakes (feel free to correct myself, be it in grammar or syntax, english is not my mother tongue, so I only have an approximate command of it at best). PS: Another problem I have with infomorphs is that, basically, if you cut their server, they "die" (or is there some "cache" or properties of memory hardware that guarantee that they will staying at current state, inactive, only being able to know that they "lost time" when server reboot (if possible) by internal horloge??). Indeed we have "" because of backups, but still.
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What piece of work is a Man, How noble in Reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, In action how like an Angel! In apprehension how like a god, the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals. and yet to me, what i
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Fri, 2012-06-08 15:34
DivineWrath DivineWrath's picture
Re: No limit limited Technology, Synthmorph, Infomorph
Quote:
Thanks for reading such a long first post, hope I did not do too much mistakes (feel free to correct myself, be it in grammar or syntax, english is not my mother tongue, so I only have an approximate command of it at best).
Yeah... I'm having trouble following you. I read the whole thing and was left very lost. I'm trying to figure out how to reply to you, but I'm having trouble with that too. I suggest that break your wall of text into individual questions. I'm not sure where one question ends and another begins. In fact, I think you're trying to post your whole thought process in the given post, when a bunch of questions would have worked better. ---- Here are a list of some of the questions *I think* you are trying to ask. 1 ) What is the name of the devices that have replaced the smart phone, that most people in Eclipse Phase use now a days? 2 ) How does accelerated simulspace work? 3 ) Can a synthmorph run at higher speeds? Can they achieve 60x acceleration? 4 ) Can an infomorph run at 60x speeds and get an advantage with hacking? 5 ) Do infomorph die if the computer they are running on is turned off?
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Fri, 2012-06-08 16:23
TadanoriOyama TadanoriOyama's picture
Re: No limit limited Technology, Synthmorph, Infomorph
The underlying answer to most of what I think your asking is fairly simple: "To preserve their humanity". Exhumans do alot of the things you seem to be talking about, like increasing their mental capabilities and are considered monsters for it. Just because the technology exists for something to be done doesn't make it mainstream or even desirable.
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Fri, 2012-06-08 16:33
DivineWrath DivineWrath's picture
Re: No limit limited Technology, Synthmorph, Infomorph
To answer those questions: 1 ) Most transhumans have something called "mesh inserts". These implants allow a person to have a personal computer in their head, and allows them to access the mesh (which is the new internet). Many bioconservatives, and hackers concerned about their security, tend to use something called an "ecto", which can be thought as tablet computer, but they suffer performance penalties and performance lag when compared to mesh inserts. Mesh inserts and ectos are effectively the same device. They just have different interfaces. A mesh insert is considered better because of the brain computer interface, as apposed to the more clumsier touch screen interface of an ecto. 2 ) From what I understand, accelerated simulspace allows and ego to run at faster speeds. They don't feel that their minds are running at faster speeds, like with drugs. Their egos *are* running faster, only that this faster speed feels normal for them. At 60x acceleration, in 1 minute's time (in the real world), they can get an 1 hour worth of work done. However, this acceleration probably uses far more computing resources than what a single mesh computer or ecto can handle. As such, an accelerated ego likely has its program distributed throughout the mesh as a means to get needed processing power. That, or they are using a quantum computer which has *lots* more computing power than a standard ecto. 3 ) A cyberbrain of a synthmorph may not be accelerated in this manner (at least I don't think so). A cyberbrain is designed to function in the real world. If it were possible, the local ego would probably want to run some program to manage their body while they overclocked, otherwise managing their bodies would become a boring chore. Everything would be moving 60 times slower than normal. Imagine trying to have conversation or walk. 4 ) It depends. The mesh isn't designed to be friendly to accelerated infomorphs. Chances are they'll be able to spend no more than 1 cycle out of 60 doing hacking, and then waiting the remaining 59 cycles for the next cycle that they can hack with. Maybe they'll play a game of solitaire until then. Or they could do something productive like write a program or something. Either way, the bulk of the work they probably need to do (in regards to hacking) happens in the real world, and may not be accelerated. 5 ) Infomorphs and egos running in synthmorphs do not die if their computer is shut off. Most computers in Eclipse Phase don't seem to posses volatile memory like our computer do, so most information is kept when shut off. In most cases, its takes about 3 action turns for their computer reboot. Once rebooted, they may resume where they left off, probably aware that their computer was shut off for some period of time.
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Fri, 2012-06-08 17:47
Decivre Decivre's picture
Re: No limit limited Technology, Synthmorph, Infomorph
Just so we're all clear: time acceleration only works [i]in the confines of a simulspace[/i]. Your interactions with the real world and the greater mesh are limited by normal speed.
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Transhumans will one day be the Luddites of the posthuman age. [url=http://bit.ly/2p3wk7c]Help me get my gaming fix, if you want.[/url]
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Fri, 2012-06-08 18:35
Murdoch Murdoch's picture
Re: No limit limited Technology, Synthmorph, Infomorph
Thanks for your responses. The 1st point is just something I have to reread, it is not a big matter. Other points are parts of my questioning yes. To add some precision; for the point 2, it is really acceleration of mind, or time perception manipulation (even coming with some memory tricks)? For the point 3, if not, is it because the "brain" has limitations (which doesn't go very well with the claimed unlimitedness of current EP tech), or because of other factors? For the point 4; yes; definitely, that is one of my questions; as if it is possible while the point 3 is not; as tech is meant to have roughtly not much boundaries in terms of processing and memory power; it raises some questions I was trying to adress. I would also complement this by; how informorph are really run (part of it being question 5)? In some kind of virtual machine shell that allows and handle server and internal communications as well as mind maintain tasks; but limit both the server aptitude to act upon the infomorph; and the aptitude of this one to act upon the server; or completely as a program, which me that basically, such a morph can be relocated in memory, trapped in enclosed spaces; accelerated or slowed given "process priorities" changes, edited at the very data level without even being conscious of it not by psychosurgery but mere informatic operations; and so on. The latter seems thought being some form of what can be really done to infomorphs, but I find it unsatisfactory as while making them vulnerable, it leave huge holes for power gaming there. And to things that can, if you think about it; circumvent most complex solution to a same problem. For the question of humanity; some people get the ability of changing sex in a matter of a week given the right implant; while that is not what human being are supposed to be capable of in the first place. Some while get increased resistance to some harsh condition to the price of acquiring what would be deemed as monstruous features in our days. But they are not some much frowned upon, by most of the EP society, because it is what it takes in some circumstances. So what is really the big deal about wanting to be clever and think faster? That is hardly socially inacceptable in terms of social interactions (it is not even some displayed feat) or visibly disgusting. Yes; some IA also became unlikely smart which led to the Fall, but that is hardly comparable, because even if running x60 will get you more actions, more time to build skills, more reactive, giving some overall feeling of improvement of your cognitive abilities; you still have the same logics (but you can train it; yet...) Ultimates try to improve themselves. They are not deemed as inhuman. So what do you think?
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What piece of work is a Man, How noble in Reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, In action how like an Angel! In apprehension how like a god, the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals. and yet to me, what i
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Fri, 2012-06-08 19:06
TadanoriOyama TadanoriOyama's picture
Re: No limit limited Technology, Synthmorph, Infomorph
I suppose it could be considered a fine line. Changing genders, altered body resistances, and other accepted augementations still leave one with a generally human outlook. I generalize the spectrum as BioCon -> Typical Transhuman -> Brinker/Scum -> Exhumans. Most of the alterations presented in the books as purchasablb by players fall fully in the Typical Transhuman area because they don't fundamentally reconstruct their world view. Seeing a new spectrum of light is cool but it doesn't drastically change the way I think about the world. Running my brain at multiple times it's normal speed... that alters how I process data and how I form thoughts/opinions.
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Fri, 2012-06-08 19:23
Decivre Decivre's picture
Re: No limit limited Technology, Synthmorph, Infomorph
Murdoch wrote:
I would also complement this by; how informorph are really run (part of it being question 5)? In some kind of virtual machine shell that allows and handle server and internal communications as well as mind maintain tasks; but limit both the server aptitude to act upon the infomorph; and the aptitude of this one to act upon the server; or completely as a program, which me that basically, such a morph can be relocated in memory, trapped in enclosed spaces; accelerated or slowed given "process priorities" changes, edited at the very data level without even being conscious of it not by psychosurgery but mere informatic operations; and so on. The latter seems thought being some form of what can be really done to infomorphs, but I find it unsatisfactory as while making them vulnerable, it leave huge holes for power gaming there. And to things that can, if you think about it; circumvent most complex solution to a same problem.
The answer to all of this is yes: an infomorph is a brain-map being processed on emulation software within a computer. Infomorphs are already accelerated well beyond normal human speeds, and that is represented with a speed rating of 3. And yes they can be hacked. Their memories are stored as XP data, and said XP data can be edited just like any file. An infomorph is quite vulnerable, and it is one of the major disadvantages to choosing to be one.
Murdoch wrote:
For the question of humanity; some people get the ability of changing sex in a matter of a week given the right implant; while that is not what human being are supposed to be capable of in the first place. Some while get increased resistance to some harsh condition to the price of acquiring what would be deemed as monstruous features in our days. But they are not some much frowned upon, by most of the EP society, because it is what it takes in some circumstances. So what is really the big deal about wanting to be clever and think faster? That is hardly socially inacceptable in terms of social interactions (it is not even some displayed feat) or visibly disgusting. Yes; some IA also became unlikely smart which led to the Fall, but that is hardly comparable, because even if running x60 will get you more actions, more time to build skills, more reactive, giving some overall feeling of improvement of your cognitive abilities; you still have the same logics (but you can train it; yet...) Ultimates try to improve themselves. They are not deemed as inhuman. So what do you think?
Just as you already see today, the ethical boundaries for what a person constitutes as abusive technology will vary from person to person. The more bioconservative sorts will likely refuse such modifications. On the other hand, some liberal sorts might be uncomfortable with the idea of dramatic mental modification... not due to some fear of the technology as a whole, but fear that you might make a mistake. That you might edit out your humanity, or create something you cannot control. Even the most liberal bodysculptors likely believe in a sense of responsibility when it comes to implants and mind hacking.
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Transhumans will one day be the Luddites of the posthuman age. [url=http://bit.ly/2p3wk7c]Help me get my gaming fix, if you want.[/url]
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Fri, 2012-06-08 19:31
Geonis Geonis's picture
Re: No limit limited Technology, Synthmorph, Infomorph
I see it as these options already exist. Mental speed, Menton morphs all boost mental capabilities. The problem, as noted by the menton morph description.
Quote:
Rumors exist of super-enhanced mentons with more extreme intelligence mods, but brain-hacking is notoriously difficult, and many attempts to redesign mental faculties result in impaired functioning, instability, or insanity.
By looking at gear, a menton will innately double an unmodified human cognitive ability (Unmodified humans operate at 10), add in a mental speed, you triple the previous boost. The problem may be not the ability to do so, but the effects of doing it. Mental speed already makes it difficulty to keep up with a normal conversation, pushing it beyond that point might cause more harm than what is gained from it. As for the infomorph issue with shutdown hardware is covered on page 265. The are in essence, unconscious during this time period. They do have the ability to resume function when it is brought back online however.
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Fri, 2012-06-08 19:53
DivineWrath DivineWrath's picture
Re: No limit limited Technology, Synthmorph, Infomorph
Decivre wrote:
Murdoch wrote:
I would also complement this by; how informorph are really run (part of it being question 5)? In some kind of virtual machine shell that allows and handle server and internal communications as well as mind maintain tasks; but limit both the server aptitude to act upon the infomorph; and the aptitude of this one to act upon the server; or completely as a program, which me that basically, such a morph can be relocated in memory, trapped in enclosed spaces; accelerated or slowed given "process priorities" changes, edited at the very data level without even being conscious of it not by psychosurgery but mere informatic operations; and so on. The latter seems thought being some form of what can be really done to infomorphs, but I find it unsatisfactory as while making them vulnerable, it leave huge holes for power gaming there. And to things that can, if you think about it; circumvent most complex solution to a same problem.
The answer to all of this is yes: an infomorph is a brain-map being processed on emulation software within a computer. Infomorphs are already accelerated well beyond normal human speeds, and that is represented with a speed rating of 3. And yes they can be hacked. Their memories are stored as XP data, and said XP data can be edited just like any file. An infomorph is quite vulnerable, and it is one of the major disadvantages to choosing to be one.
To add to this, there is a black market for soul trading. It involves stealing backups of egos and then selling them on the black market. I'm not going to go into details as to what you can do with a stolen ego, but a good look through the psychosurgery part of the core rule book should give you some ideas. Anyone with with a cortical stack, or exists as data is vulnerable to this. Hell, a freshly decapitated head can be used to make a forced upload, so even extreme bioconservatives are not safe. Its rare for someone to make off with a person's backup when protected by a reputable backup facility (they are not connected to the mesh to prevent hacking). However, any biomorph can be killed so you can steal their cortical stack. A synthmorpths can be hacked to so you can download a copy of their ego as it runs, but hacking a cyberbrain or mesh inserts suffer a -30 penalty. I'm a little bit fuzzy on the details regarding hacking infomorpths though...
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Fri, 2012-06-08 21:52
Sepherim Sepherim's picture
Re: No limit limited Technology, Synthmorph, Infomorph
I agree with Geonis. Mental speed of transhumans has been greatly improved. Still, as for why it is limited and doesn't go beyond that, I'd also add fear as a reason. Not only technological limits apply, but people are still very afraid of the singularity and TITANs. If you push human mind too far, they fear, you may become alien and destructive, just like they did, so all investigation that draws the human (or artificial) mind near that point is an x-threat and as such, is banned and hunted. It's not only a matter of not being able to do so, but also social control that prevents it.
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Sat, 2012-06-09 02:54
Smokeskin Smokeskin's picture
Re: No limit limited Technology, Synthmorph, Infomorph
Simulspace acceleration makes no sense and I don't allow it. Infomorphs would completely dominate the workforce and society if it was possible, and it is very difficult to explain why cyberbrains can't perform at the same level.
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Sat, 2012-06-09 03:46
DivineWrath DivineWrath's picture
Re: No limit limited Technology, Synthmorph, Infomorph
You are welcome to disallow simulspace acceleration. Just watch out for forking though, as a great many forks could potentially do the same work load, and possibly work better as the forks don't need to wait so much for the mesh to catch up to them. They have the potential to operate morphs without the need for them to be connected to the mesh and such. Also watch out for getting your ego captured by the enemy as there is probably little the captured ego can do to resist. Given a competent psycho-surgeon, and plenty of time, just about any ego can be somehow cracked and be forced to talk, or be tortured. Actually, there doesn't seems to much of a shortage of bad things one could possibly do to another...
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Sat, 2012-06-09 04:46
Decivre Decivre's picture
Re: No limit limited Technology, Synthmorph, Infomorph
Smokeskin wrote:
Simulspace acceleration makes no sense and I don't allow it. Infomorphs would completely dominate the workforce and society if it was possible, and it is very difficult to explain why cyberbrains can't perform at the same level.
Why would infomorphs dominate? Anyone and everyone can utilize simspace acceleration, irregardless of their current sleeve. If anything, simulspace is the ultimate equalizer.
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Transhumans will one day be the Luddites of the posthuman age. [url=http://bit.ly/2p3wk7c]Help me get my gaming fix, if you want.[/url]
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Sat, 2012-06-09 05:33
Smokeskin Smokeskin's picture
Re: No limit limited Technology, Synthmorph, Infomorph
Decivre wrote:
Why would infomorphs dominate? Anyone and everyone can utilize simspace acceleration, irregardless of their current sleeve. If anything, simulspace is the ultimate equalizer.
First, the idea that you can accelerate to x60 just because your brain is connected to VR makes no sense - you need to have your ego running on a machine, ie. you're an infomorph. Second, if people can run at x60, taking time off and using a physical morph means that it is costing you 60 times as much as those just staying in simulspace (and this applies even if you let any sleeve run at x60 in simulspace, it does not depend on only letting infomorphs run at x60). Using a physical sleeve would be reserved for the ultra-rich and comparable to taking long hiatuses, as taking just a weekend off in realtime would be 4 months gone by in simulspace, extremely costly and you're getting left behind. In daily life, there's no way you could work and take time off in realtime.
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Sat, 2012-06-09 07:07
Decivre Decivre's picture
Re: No limit limited Technology, Synthmorph, Infomorph
Smokeskin wrote:
First, the idea that you can accelerate to x60 just because your brain is connected to VR makes no sense - you need to have your ego running on a machine, ie. you're an infomorph.
I can see how it can make some sense, though perhaps not as fast as x60 speed. Neural stimulation combined with sensory override might amplify the speed at which the brain operates. The other possibility is that mesh inserts or access jacks both require cognitive modifications that increase the information transfer potential within the brain to a level well above natural speeds, but which are limited to sensory speeds. Simulspace, with accelerated sensory input and natural sensory override, would allow for accelerated brain processing.
Smokeskin wrote:
Second, if people can run at x60, taking time off and using a physical morph means that it is costing you 60 times as much as those just staying in simulspace (and this applies even if you let any sleeve run at x60 in simulspace, it does not depend on only letting infomorphs run at x60). Using a physical sleeve would be reserved for the ultra-rich and comparable to taking long hiatuses, as taking just a weekend off in realtime would be 4 months gone by in simulspace, extremely costly and you're getting left behind. In daily life, there's no way you could work and take time off in realtime.
Not all simulspaces will be run at 60x acceleration. Computers are still confined by processor limits, so larger scale simulations will be a greater load, reducing the speed as a result. A virtual office might run at 60x acceleration, but a virtual representation of the big bang (relevant to physicists) might run [i]far slower[/i]. To that end, many things won't benefit from simspace acceleration at all. A programmer that is compiling and debugging his software is not going to see any perks working in simulspace, as his program is confined to whatever speed it can go on the processor... he'll just be watching it compile and run 60 times slower than he would if he were jacked out or in a realtime sim. Plus all this is merely assuming that you are a service worker. Any person that works in the real world (miners, manufacturers, labor managers) gets no real benefit from simulspace in the workplace. Not to mention that we haven't gotten any info about how much computing power is actually required to run a 60x simspace... I highly doubt that you can produce one within your mesh inserts. Not many people are going to be able to reap the benefits of accelerated simspace if it requires a large server cluster to pull off a small simulated region.
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Transhumans will one day be the Luddites of the posthuman age. [url=http://bit.ly/2p3wk7c]Help me get my gaming fix, if you want.[/url]
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Sat, 2012-06-09 07:11
Murdoch Murdoch's picture
Re: No limit limited Technology, Synthmorph, Infomorph
Well thanks for all those answers. I guess that vulnerability of IM just balance somewhat the things. I had missed the fact that someone in simulspace interacts at normal speed with the outside, so it is less powerful. But I wonder why this would not apply for a normal emulation, as said before, since you can virtually use processing power the same; and as someone said, finally some kind of "acceleration" already exists with the Mentons; so it is possible to do it. Or it is implicit that in simulspace; you are really no hold barred and that it has to be in some kind of isolated thing as a protection for both the host system and the morph.
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What piece of work is a Man, How noble in Reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, In action how like an Angel! In apprehension how like a god, the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals. and yet to me, what i
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Sat, 2012-06-09 07:23
Decivre Decivre's picture
Re: No limit limited Technology, Synthmorph, Infomorph
Murdoch wrote:
Well thanks for all those answers. I guess that vulnerability of IM just balance somewhat the things. I had missed the fact that someone in simulspace interacts at normal speed with the outside, so it is less powerful. But I wonder why this would not apply for a normal emulation, as said before, since you can virtually use processing power the same; and as someone said, finally some kind of "acceleration" already exists with the Mentons; so it is possible to do it. Or it is implicit that in simulspace; you are really no hold barred and that it has to be in some kind of isolated thing as a protection for both the host system and the morph.
As I mentioned before, infomorphs are already accelerated and have a speed rating of 3 to represent this. As for mental bonuses for infomorphs, the devs have mentioned that they will probably come in a future release. We just haven't seen them yet.
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Transhumans will one day be the Luddites of the posthuman age. [url=http://bit.ly/2p3wk7c]Help me get my gaming fix, if you want.[/url]
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Sat, 2012-06-09 07:44
Murdoch Murdoch's picture
Re: No limit limited Technology, Synthmorph, Infomorph
Ok. But I was meaning it in a more general way; as "normal emulation" can also stand for "ego in a synthmorph brain".
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What piece of work is a Man, How noble in Reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, In action how like an Angel! In apprehension how like a god, the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals. and yet to me, what i
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Tue, 2012-06-12 04:51
Smokeskin Smokeskin's picture
Re: No limit limited Technology, Synthmorph, Infomorph
Decivre wrote:
Smokeskin wrote:
First, the idea that you can accelerate to x60 just because your brain is connected to VR makes no sense - you need to have your ego running on a machine, ie. you're an infomorph.
I can see how it can make some sense, though perhaps not as fast as x60 speed. Neural stimulation combined with sensory override might amplify the speed at which the brain operates. The other possibility is that mesh inserts or access jacks both require cognitive modifications that increase the information transfer potential within the brain to a level well above natural speeds, but which are limited to sensory speeds. Simulspace, with accelerated sensory input and natural sensory override, would allow for accelerated brain processing.
Neural stimulation, sensory override, it's just technical mumbo jumbo and you don't explain why it'd only apply when you're in simulspace. What it boils down to is that if your brain can run at 60x speed in simulspace, there's no reason it can't do so all the time. It would be like the mental speed augmentation, only 20 times as powerful.
Decivre wrote:
Smokeskin wrote:
Second, if people can run at x60, taking time off and using a physical morph means that it is costing you 60 times as much as those just staying in simulspace (and this applies even if you let any sleeve run at x60 in simulspace, it does not depend on only letting infomorphs run at x60). Using a physical sleeve would be reserved for the ultra-rich and comparable to taking long hiatuses, as taking just a weekend off in realtime would be 4 months gone by in simulspace, extremely costly and you're getting left behind. In daily life, there's no way you could work and take time off in realtime.
Not all simulspaces will be run at 60x acceleration. Computers are still confined by processor limits, so larger scale simulations will be a greater load, reducing the speed as a result. A virtual office might run at 60x acceleration, but a virtual representation of the big bang (relevant to physicists) might run [i]far slower[/i].
Let me make a pretty wild guess here: people are going to work in virtual offices and not inside big bang simulations. Even if they're going to be analyzing data from a big bang simulation, they're going to do it in a virtual office running at x60 speed. Now let me tell you a story of the human resources worker presenting 2 candidates for a job opening to the manager (for simplicity's sake I pretend people don't take weekends): [i]Ok sir, we got 2 candidates. First up is Dennis Digital. He's offering an 8 minutes on, 16 minutes off shift, so he's going to be putting in 8 hours of work every 24 minutes. He's an infomorph, so he'll get 16 hours of recreational time between each shift and meet up happy, well rested and ready to work, with little risk of burnout even when he's putting in 60 full time equivalent days of work per day. Next up is Philip Physical. First he wanted to put in 8 hours of work per day in real time, but as we have plenty of infomorphs putting in 60 times as much and we need him to interact with them, he accepted to work in simulspace. He then wanted to work only one 8 minute shift per day, because he's sleeved in an exalt and all his private time is done in realtime and he really didn't want to experience more than 8 hours of subjective work per day. I convinced him to do two 8 minute shifts per day though. I'm not sure we should try pressuring him to work more, because he's already looking at a subjective 16 hours of work per day, which will be pretty tough on him. The job will be plenty stressful for him already, every time he clocks in he'll have to catch up with the 29 days of work his infomorph coworkers put in while he was off. It's really funny, they're asking for the same pay per month even though Dennis will put in 30 times as much work, but I don't think we can get Philip to accept anything lower - he really needs that much money to support his physical lifestyle.[/i] Do you really think that anyone at realtime speed can compete with people going at x60? Even if they too work at x60, if they take time off in realspace they fall hopelessly behind.
Decivre wrote:
To that end, many things won't benefit from simspace acceleration at all. A programmer that is compiling and debugging his software is not going to see any perks working in simulspace, as his program is confined to whatever speed it can go on the processor... he'll just be watching it compile and run 60 times slower than he would if he were jacked out or in a realtime sim.
Pretend that you're a software development manager in the present day. You're making software that takes 4 hours to compile, and each test takes 2 hours. Are you going to have your programmers just sit and stare at the compilation process, or are you going to structure their work so they will do something meaningful with their time? Do you really think this can't be solved in the future. Furthermore, if you can run a human mind at x60 times speed, your compilation and test processes will also run blinding fast. We can make guesses as to how software complexity and compilation time scale with hardware, but there is no convincing argument that I can see that relative compilation times will rise.
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Sat, 2012-06-09 11:53
Sepherim Sepherim's picture
Re: No limit limited Technology, Synthmorph, Infomorph
Smokeskin wrote:
Neural stimulation, sensory override, it's just technical mumbo jumbo and you don't explain why it'd only apply when you're in simulspace. What it boils down to is that if your brain can run at 60x speed in simulspace, there's no reason it can't do so all the time. It would be like the mental speed augmentation, only 20 times as powerful.
Not only technical mumbo jumbo. Currently, our own brains dedicate around 15 % of their capacity to "thinking". The rest is spent on breathing, remembering, pumping blood, processing what you hear, holding your beliefs, etc. All that, or most of it, can be overriden by a simulspace, which eliminates all body functions of the brain, thus releasing a lot of processing capacity for other things.
Smokeskin wrote:
First up is Dennis Digital. He's offering an 8 minutes on, 16 minutes off shift, so he's going to be putting in 8 hours of work every 24 minutes. He's an infomorph, so he'll get 16 hours of recreational time between each shift and meet up happy, well rested and ready to work, with little risk of burnout even when he's putting in 60 full time equivalent days of work per day.
Actually no. Though numbers are right, that only applies to time spent on simulspace. So Dennis Digital enjoys a lot of happy leisure time alone in his own simulspace, without external interaction, unless other people join his very accelerated simulspace. I'm sure there's a limit to the amount of movies, videogames, etc, you can play and not fall down to mental stress due to the fact that you're alone. Transhuman, as normal humans, are a social specie, they need interactions with others.
Quote:
Next up is Philip Physical. First he wanted to put in 8 hours of work per day in real time, but as we have plenty of infomorphs putting in 60 times as much and we need him to interact with them, he accepted to work in simulspace. He then wanted to work only one 8 minute shift per day, because he's sleeved in an exalt and all his private time is done in realtime and he really didn't want to experience more than 8 hours of subjective work per day. I convinced him to do two 8 minute shifts per day though. I'm not sure we should try pressuring him to work more, because he's already looking at a subjective 16 hours of work per day, which will be pretty tough on him. The job will be plenty stressful for him already, every time he clocks in he'll have to catch up with the 29 days of work his infomorph coworkers put in while he was off.
Sure, he works less hours. But then, Philip Physical is a friend of Johnny Interesting, has a 55 c-rep score and a 45 r-rep score thanks to his previous works and friends circle. Which mean he can get us new contracts thanks to his connections, gain information from them, etc. Not to mention he can meet the other parts which may be interested in our dealings (like possible clients), which are as physical as we are. On the other hand, Dennis Digital can do none of those things. Being alone he doesn't have rep, he can't meet people in the physical space, etc. Work done isn't only measured in hours of time spent, but mostly on their productivity. And there are things that increase productivity a lot that don't depend on time, such as webs of contacts, etc.
Smokeskin wrote:
Pretend that you're a software development manager in the present day. You're making software that takes 4 hours to compile, and each test takes 2 hours. Are you going to have your programmers just sit and stare at the compilation process, or are you going to structure their work so they will do something meaningful with their time? Do you really think this can't be solved in the future.
Depends. If your company only has one project at any given moment, for example, and that project is compiling, there is nothing else to do. Or, as someone pointed out, with any job that has to do with the physical world: mining, building things, etc. You can't accelerate in simulspace the speed of a mining laser, for example. But even many non-physical works depend on many things that are limited by time in one way or another: a stock exchange in another station, for example, will have all your operations delayed due to the lag that comes from sending and receiving orders at such long distances.
Quote:
Furthermore, if you can run a human mind at x60 times speed, your compilation and test processes will also run blinding fast. We can make guesses as to how software complexity and compilation time scale with hardware, but there is no convincing argument that I can see that relative compilation times will rise.
Maybe, maybe not. It all depends on the sheer size of the programs. Sure, a 16 Gb program of the XXIst century would be compiled in instants. But a whole simulspace of the big bang, to use the example used in the past, would be so vast that the processing power to calculate it would be so enormous that it probably would still require serious time. And it would also depend on where it is running (not the same an ecto on a hand, a mesh insert, or a full server devoted to it) and the number of other things it is running at the same time (like the very accelerated simulspace for the infomorph).
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Sat, 2012-06-09 15:16
Smokeskin Smokeskin's picture
Re: No limit limited Technology, Synthmorph, Infomorph
Sepherim wrote:
Currently, our own brains dedicate around 15 % of their capacity to "thinking". The rest is spent on breathing, remembering, pumping blood, processing what you hear, holding your beliefs, etc. All that, or most of it, can be overriden by a simulspace, which eliminates all body functions of the brain, thus releasing a lot of processing capacity for other things.
I have no idea what you're talking about. Are you saying that if someone connects to simulspace, their brain rewires itself?!?
Sepherim wrote:
Actually no. Though numbers are right, that only applies to time spent on simulspace. So Dennis Digital enjoys a lot of happy leisure time alone in his own simulspace, without external interaction, unless other people join his very accelerated simulspace. I'm sure there's a limit to the amount of movies, videogames, etc, you can play and not fall down to mental stress due to the fact that you're alone. Transhuman, as normal humans, are a social specie, they need interactions with others.
Of course almost everyone is also hooked up into accelerated simulspaces and able to interact socially.
Sepherim wrote:
Sure, he works less hours. But then, Philip Physical is a friend of Johnny Interesting, has a 55 c-rep score and a 45 r-rep score thanks to his previous works and friends circle. Which mean he can get us new contracts thanks to his connections, gain information from them, etc. Not to mention he can meet the other parts which may be interested in our dealings (like possible clients), which are as physical as we are.
You have no reason to assume that the physical have better rep than the infomorphs, especially in a world where anyone doing real work is going to be living in accelerated simulspace and will find it extremely tedious to interact with the slow people in realtime.
Sepherim wrote:
Depends. If your company only has one project at any given moment, for example, and that project is compiling, there is nothing else to do.
If you conduct that business that way, you're extremely incompetent and in the EP world of hypercorps and cutthroat competition, you're not going to last long (not that you're ever going to get a management position to begin with if you think like that).
Sepherim wrote:
Or, as someone pointed out, with any job that has to do with the physical world: mining, building things, etc. You can't accelerate in simulspace the speed of a mining laser, for example.
Accelerated infomorphs could control mining lasers though. But even then, guys who operate machines tend be on the lower socioeconomic rungs.
Sepherim wrote:
But even many non-physical works depend on many things that are limited by time in one way or another: a stock exchange in another station, for example, will have all your operations delayed due to the lag that comes from sending and receiving orders at such long distances.
People like that don't just sit and look at stock numbers change. They spend the majority of their time collecting information, doing analysis, making investor presentations, designing derivatives, programming software, etc.
Sepherim wrote:
Maybe, maybe not. It all depends on the sheer size of the programs. Sure, a 16 Gb program of the XXIst century would be compiled in instants. But a whole simulspace of the big bang, to use the example used in the past, would be so vast that the processing power to calculate it would be so enormous that it probably would still require serious time. And it would also depend on where it is running (not the same an ecto on a hand, a mesh insert, or a full server devoted to it) and the number of other things it is running at the same time (like the very accelerated simulspace for the infomorph).
And again, people aren't just going to sit there and look at the simulation unfold. The simulation is going to run while people are working on something else, and when there is data for people to look at, they'll begin working on it. Say you're a student working on a software project that takes a long time to compile. While it compiles, you're not going to do nothing - you're going to either do something you like, or you're going to study or work on something else (or all of them combined if you're lucky). But you have the choice because you're a student and doing things according to your own schedule. If you're doing the same while employed however and you have an even halfway competent manager, he's going to have planned the project so there are meaningful things to do while it is compiling (and if you're a halfway competent worker you'd plan it that way yourself anyway). Hustle while you wait!
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Sat, 2012-06-09 17:15
Geonis Geonis's picture
Re: No limit limited Technology, Synthmorph, Infomorph
Here is some misconceptions. Simulspaces are not just an off-shoot of the mesh, but highly sophisticated programs which follow their own program based rules, they are generally, from my understanding, ran on their own mesh nodes. Directly accessing external nodes would require toggling or log out of the simulspace, page 263. Anything a simulspace shows or reacts to has to already be programmed into it before hand, it won't be able to quantify the unknown. Two simulspaces running would still have the time for data to be transferred between them in takes place in meatspace. Even if both are running at 60 times speed, the transfer between to two is multiplied by 60. This delay could get quite bad when off habitat, or even to other planets. Also to note, while immersed in the simulspace, you ability to perceive the outside world is quite diminished (-60). Eventually, real world naivete will kick in, you act mostly in a simulated environment, not the actual one. Spending 5 years refining a new scientific discovery only to find out the next day it was fundamentally flawed (Only a month of real time passing) could be quite jarring. Long term psychological effects might be quite bad.
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Sat, 2012-06-09 19:02
DivineWrath DivineWrath's picture
Re: No limit limited Technology, Synthmorph, Infomorph
I would like to point out that most infomorphs, at least those that work for hypercorp, are indentured. This means that the hypercorps can put artificial barriers in place to keep the infomorph as low class citizens, with no real opportunities to advance or take proper advantage of their situation for their benefit. Also, most people still think that having an organic body is the social norm and proper, to the point that synthmorphs are considered part of the clanking masses. Basically, infomorphs do have advantages, just they are never allowed to realize it and exploit them. Many people tend to be very poor at reconsidering their goals. After 5 years of being an infomorph, they may have realized that being an infomorph isn't that bad or may even be good for them. However, because it has spent 5 years working on a 20 year contract to get a new body, it'll feel the need to remain committed to finish its work. My time studying economics says that a person or company should seriously try to reconsider a problem by ignoring the time or resources already spent (you're not going to get them back if decide to quit or change your mind so they effectively don't exist). You should consider if the remaining time or resources needed to do something it worth it. In this case, the infomorph should consider if 15 years of work is worth a new body. Suffice to say, many people will feel the need to continue to commit because have spent time and resources they are not able to get back, and will continue to commit even if conditions have changed and they're going down hill... I'm inclined to compare this to a gambling problem (but I don't really know much about the topic really) as the infomorphs will feel the need to keep committing resources with the belief that things will get better.
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Sat, 2012-06-09 19:18
Decivre Decivre's picture
Re: No limit limited Technology, Synthmorph, Infomorph
Smokeskin wrote:
I have no idea what you're talking about. Are you saying that if someone connects to simulspace, their brain rewires itself?!?
Yes and no. The brain rewires itself all the time, it's part and parcel to plasticity. Simulspace, by design, has to replace your brain's normal sensory input, overriding your eyes, ears, nose, tongue and skin. If that doesn't have an effect on the brain's structure, I don't know what will.
Smokeskin wrote:
Of course almost everyone is also hooked up into accelerated simulspaces and able to interact socially.
Which again brings us back to needing extremely powerful server clusters to run large simulspaces. A virtual office would have, at best, two minds and a small virtual space to manage. Adding more minds and more space is going to eat up resources like a beast. My guess is that the most common form of simulspace is unaccelerated simulspace, perhaps even decelerated simulspace. It takes the least processor resources. You might even be able to run a decelerated simulspace on your mesh inserts with ease.
Smokeskin wrote:
You have no reason to assume that the physical have better rep than the infomorphs, especially in a world where anyone doing real work is going to be living in accelerated simulspace and will find it extremely tedious to interact with the slow people in realtime.
Definitely incorrect. The impoverish live in infomorph form, while those with any real reputation and money are likely to have a physical sleeve (likely a biomorph). Infomorphs are reserved for those that can't afford bodies, those that never had bodies (AGI), the the sort of people that want that life (likely in the outer system, where the hypercorp style of working in an office is largely obsolete anyways).
Smokeskin wrote:
If you conduct that business that way, you're extremely incompetent and in the EP world of hypercorps and cutthroat competition, you're not going to last long (not that you're ever going to get a management position to begin with if you think like that).
Hypercorps run the gamut in terms of width and range. You're likely going to have some hypercorps that are built around a single product, especially since you already see businesses built like that today. It would not surprise me in the least Besides, the only time a coder gets any benefit from existing in accelerated simspace is when they are writing code (and can therefore write 60 times faster). And it's rare for a coder in a large team to be in charge of more than one major component to a software suite (because they don't want you mixing up your code between components... they want you to focus on getting what you can right). So unless you plan on getting 60 times the solitaire done, there are going to be plenty of cases where acceleration won't help.
Smokeskin wrote:
Accelerated infomorphs could control mining lasers though. But even then, guys who operate machines tend be on the lower socioeconomic rungs.
What benefit would you get out of moving a mining laser at 1/60th the speed? Because relative to accelerated simspace, that's how fast that laser is going to be moving. That kind of work is going to be tedious as hell. And of course they'll be lower on the socioeconomic rung. Most infomorphs [i]are lower on the socioeconomic rung[/i]. That's the cost of not being able to afford a body.
Smokeskin wrote:
People like that don't just sit and look at stock numbers change. They spend the majority of their time collecting information, doing analysis, making investor presentations, designing derivatives, programming software, etc.
The stock market is not in motion 24 hours a day. It stays relatively stationary while the market is closed everyday. And I highly doubt that they're going to change that even in the future... the downtime in the market is somewhat essential to its (relative) stability. I can't think of many particular reasons that a person would require 1050 hours between when the exchange opens and when it closes (based on the opening and closing times for NYSE, could be more or less for PCSE's running times) to plan out their strategies. Most traders likely spend a few hours every evening planning out and doing research, then leaving simspace and going home for the night.
Smokeskin wrote:
And again, people aren't just going to sit there and look at the simulation unfold. The simulation is going to run while people are working on something else, and when there is data for people to look at, they'll begin working on it. Say you're a student working on a software project that takes a long time to compile. While it compiles, you're not going to do nothing - you're going to either do something you like, or you're going to study or work on something else (or all of them combined if you're lucky). But you have the choice because you're a student and doing things according to your own schedule. If you're doing the same while employed however and you have an even halfway competent manager, he's going to have planned the project so there are meaningful things to do while it is compiling (and if you're a halfway competent worker you'd plan it that way yourself anyway). Hustle while you wait!
I used to run physics simulations on a business server that dealt with material design and aerodynamics (that's all I can tell you with regards to specifics). When I got to work, I was given a vast amount of data regarding info on the physical tests, and that data was inputted into a simulation for predicting other scenarios and their outcomes. While the simulation was running and we were waiting for the output to come, there is literally nothing to do... you can't really plan or even write new code because code revisions are based on the inaccuracies of output data, which you don't have because the simulation isn't finished. The end result is a lot of waiting, and that wouldn't really change with the invention of accelerated simulspace. At best we would simply finish our work faster and dick around more (60 times more). This is especially true when I used to do network maintenance and troubleshooting. I had two jobs when I did that; adding new features when someone wanted them, and fixing problems as they arise. You might be thinking "hey, why not think of new features", but that's how I got my pay docked in my 2nd month... new features could only be ok'd by administration, and even when its recommended by us it'll take at least a couple days to run by them... which means more waiting. The end result is that being a code monkey oftentimes means a lot of dicking off. If anything, I'd kill for simspace [i]deceleration[/i]; that way, I can wait through an hour's worth of doing nothing in only a minute's time.
—
Transhumans will one day be the Luddites of the posthuman age. [url=http://bit.ly/2p3wk7c]Help me get my gaming fix, if you want.[/url]
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Sun, 2012-06-10 04:56
Smokeskin Smokeskin's picture
Re: No limit limited Technology, Synthmorph, Infomorph
Decivre wrote:
Smokeskin wrote:
I have no idea what you're talking about. Are you saying that if someone connects to simulspace, their brain rewires itself?!?
Yes and no. The brain rewires itself all the time, it's part and parcel to plasticity. Simulspace, by design, has to replace your brain's normal sensory input, overriding your eyes, ears, nose, tongue and skin. If that doesn't have an effect on the brain's structure, I don't know what will.
So you're saying that if a morph connects to an accelerated simulspace, plasticity will rewire the brain instantly, and then rewire itself back upon disconnecting from the simulspace? That's just not the timescale that plasticity works on, sorry. I have also never heard about plasticity being able to let brain centres drastically alter their function. The motor cortex can adapt to control a robot arm or mouse pointer, sure, but contributing to abstract thinking is highly unlikely. And what is downright impossible is your apparent idea that unused brain centres can be used to speed up your thinking. The way you think, analyze information and make decisions is explicitly encoded in the brain's structure - even if you did "give it access to more brain matter", the parts of your brain that "think" wouldn't run any faster.
Decivre wrote:
Smokeskin wrote:
Of course almost everyone is also hooked up into accelerated simulspaces and able to interact socially.
Which again brings us back to needing extremely powerful server clusters to run large simulspaces. A virtual office would have, at best, two minds and a small virtual space to manage. Adding more minds and more space is going to eat up resources like a beast.
Who says you need extremely powerful server clusters for it? Nothing indicates that it is especially difficult or expensive, it is even mentioned as being used for simple recreational purposes. And if you need hardware 60 times as expensive to run a worker at x60 speed, then it isn't anymore expensive per unit of work to run your workers fast - but you do get the advantages of extremely high tempo and low response time to external events.
Decivre wrote:
Smokeskin wrote:
You have no reason to assume that the physical have better rep than the infomorphs, especially in a world where anyone doing real work is going to be living in accelerated simulspace and will find it extremely tedious to interact with the slow people in realtime.
Definitely incorrect. The impoverish live in infomorph form, while those with any real reputation and money are likely to have a physical sleeve (likely a biomorph). Infomorphs are reserved for those that can't afford bodies, those that never had bodies (AGI), the the sort of people that want that life (likely in the outer system, where the hypercorp style of working in an office is largely obsolete anyways).
Are you trolling now? The argument is that if simulspace allows for x60 speed, everyone doing anything important would constantly operate at x60 speed, which is inconsistent with several things in the setting. Obviously you can't use that inconsistency to disprove the argument.
Decivre wrote:
Smokeskin wrote:
Accelerated infomorphs could control mining lasers though. But even then, guys who operate machines tend be on the lower socioeconomic rungs.
What benefit would you get out of moving a mining laser at 1/60th the speed? Because relative to accelerated simspace, that's how fast that laser is going to be moving. That kind of work is going to be tedious as hell.
Note that I wrote "mining lasers", not "a mining laser". You could oversee much more equipment if you operated at x60 speed. A lot of automation requiring human oversight also has to be slowed down to allow for the abysmally slow human reactions compared to the speed that machinery can move at.
Decivre wrote:
Smokeskin wrote:
People like that don't just sit and look at stock numbers change. They spend the majority of their time collecting information, doing analysis, making investor presentations, designing derivatives, programming software, etc.
The stock market is not in motion 24 hours a day. It stays relatively stationary while the market is closed everyday. And I highly doubt that they're going to change that even in the future... the downtime in the market is somewhat essential to its (relative) stability.
Are you really saying that if human thought was sped up x60 (and the processing power and bandwidth compared to today increased by many orders of magnitude) stuff like the open trading hours would stay on a 24 hour cycle?
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Sun, 2012-06-10 05:02
Smokeskin Smokeskin's picture
Re: No limit limited Technology, Synthmorph, Infomorph
Geonis wrote:
Here is some misconceptions. Simulspaces are not just an off-shoot of the mesh, but highly sophisticated programs which follow their own program based rules, they are generally, from my understanding, ran on their own mesh nodes. Directly accessing external nodes would require toggling or log out of the simulspace, page 263.
Obviously a simulspace virtual office would give mesh access to the workers.
Geonis wrote:
Also to note, while immersed in the simulspace, you ability to perceive the outside world is quite diminished (-60).
That applies to your physical morph's senses, not to a simulspace representation of the physical world.
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Sun, 2012-06-10 09:20
Murdoch Murdoch's picture
Re: No limit limited Technology, Synthmorph, Infomorph
Decivre wrote:
Yes and no. The brain rewires itself all the time, it's part and parcel to plasticity. Simulspace, by design, has to replace your brain's normal sensory input, overriding your eyes, ears, nose, tongue and skin. If that doesn't have an effect on the brain's structure, I don't know what will.
Changing the source of input doesn't mean you change the structure of the receiving end. You could achieve that by putting electrodes in the brain to act on aural, or ocular nerves; for example. And it is easy to cut other inputs for that. You don't need rewiring. As for the question of assigning other areas brain processing power to calculation and so on, it is a complex question where you both have good points. I agree with Smokeskin that part of the capabilities and types of processing are encoded in brain wet structures, like visual hypercolumns, or more simply, just by their wirings to and from specific areas and in specific fashions. Though, we know that in case of need, brain, given time, can rewire large portions of itself to reconnect and take in charge lost functions as it somehow "remembers" it had it (because their imprint is still encoded in memories, or because it is imprinted in genetic program that you should always have some kind of this function active, or because it is a genetic regeneration safety triggered by some kind of activity in the brain networks) and tries to achieve the same results. That does not mean that in our case it applies, but it says that neurons are indeed very flexible. But this "reassignment" things doesn't really feel right to me here, first of all because of time scale and of the massive rewiring needed. But indeed, the technology could be adapted to input some signals in some ways, to make them process by the parts of the brain and get the output, with no consciousness for the user of them being exploited and without consequences on its virtual shell. Like if the thing sent spatial data irrelevant to body position for them to be processed by hindbrain and temporal areas, this being seamless for the user and not even being related to its "virtual physical actions" (or actions in the virtual simulation). Anyway; the thing of having more areas available to work don't make them faster at the hardware level. That is not because you multiply processors that you get an higher individual frequency; less latency times and so on. If you build them into a dedicated architecture you will increase buses; threading; sheer operation number per unit of time, but that does not mean individual component get better. So maybe we are limited by the speed of our less efficient components (some neurons have slower transmission speeds, even in brain. Other have higher integration and discharge thresholds, more or less latency, discharge frequency, and so on) but also by our basic functionning mechanism: electrochemical transmission is SLOW at the scale of computers. Because even if you are not so limited by your axon wires because you can, given some electronical things; set potentials and make them act sort of the way you want (while this should be taken with a massive grain of salt the size of Mount Rushmore, as you must still work with the biochemical equipment like voltage channels and so on, and their characteristics, even if with appropriate drugs, you can activate or deactivate some, modify some characteristics and so functional patterns, you still have some thing you must play with and it is not meant to be so flexible that you conceiving your circuitry with the feats you choose as the most effective for your use), once you have to go throught the synaptic cleft, you must wait for neurotransmitter to diffuse there and bind to their receptors on so on, you must take into account latencies time, also, recycling, recapture or degradation, and so on. Indeed we can say that we override this with wires, but then you lose the need to pass by elements of the circuitry, while actually this is going through all the networks that makes integration and signal processing. And that would make you conscious and understanding of this. Unless, it reduces your brain to neurons as units, and I don't see the point to use neuron units to pass signal into for signal processing; I mean; it is the same way that using an electronic circuitry, and far less efficient. So there is a lot of technical things to achieve that. The best solution seems to considerate that brain areas function as they are made for; like visual areas working for processing virtual visual inputs and so on. And that you can achieve some speed increase by technical enforcing, but making it 60 times faster is impossible (yeah, at least with our science, EP is far more advanced, I admit it). My conclusion is that if you have a physical morph and want to work in accelerated simulspace, you must do it the Matrix way; transfer your ego inside the matrix (and be cut of your body if the link is broken, that won't kill you as in the movie; but that is a risk)
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What piece of work is a Man, How noble in Reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, In action how like an Angel! In apprehension how like a god, the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals. and yet to me, what i
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Sun, 2012-06-10 13:12
Decivre Decivre's picture
Re: No limit limited Technology, Synthmorph, Infomorph
Smokeskin wrote:
So you're saying that if a morph connects to an accelerated simulspace, plasticity will rewire the brain instantly, and then rewire itself back upon disconnecting from the simulspace? That's just not the timescale that plasticity works on, sorry. I have also never heard about plasticity being able to let brain centres drastically alter their function. The motor cortex can adapt to control a robot arm or mouse pointer, sure, but contributing to abstract thinking is highly unlikely. And what is downright impossible is your apparent idea that unused brain centres can be used to speed up your thinking. The way you think, analyze information and make decisions is explicitly encoded in the brain's structure - even if you did "give it access to more brain matter", the parts of your brain that "think" wouldn't run any faster.
No, I'm saying that the brain rewires itself post-implant to be able to accept accelerated data, which as a byproduct allows it to run at faster rates while in simulspace. And I never mentioned anything about unused brain matter. I said that the brain's pace is likely set by the pace in which it receives and responds to information. Mesh inserts and access jacks likely include unmentioned implants that allow the brain to operate at machine-level speeds in order to cope with such fast output... because otherwise, such interfaces will be staggeringly slow and little advantageous.
Smokeskin wrote:
Who says you need extremely powerful server clusters for it? Nothing indicates that it is especially difficult or expensive, it is even mentioned as being used for simple recreational purposes. And if you need hardware 60 times as expensive to run a worker at x60 speed, then it isn't anymore expensive per unit of work to run your workers fast - but you do get the advantages of extremely high tempo and low response time to external events.
Not 60 times more expensive... hardware doesn't scale like that. You would need a processor that can clock 60 times the calculations in the same period of time. In comparison to today, if a 3 GHz processor was needed for a realtime simulation, you would need a 180 GHz processor for an x60 simulation (assuming the same instruction set). This becomes even more devastating in comparison to a 1/60th simulation. If mesh inserts can run a 1/60th simulation only, you would need a processor block capable of running 3600 times the number of calculations in the same exact amount of time (again, assuming the same instruction set).
Smokeskin wrote:
Are you trolling now? The argument is that if simulspace allows for x60 speed, everyone doing anything important would constantly operate at x60 speed, which is inconsistent with several things in the setting. Obviously you can't use that inconsistency to disprove the argument.
Okay, fair enough. But your argument solely rests on the idea that this is inconsistent, as you are working under the claim that accelerated biological minds are impossible. That isn't so much a consistency as a personal sense of disbelief. Not everyone has a problem with the concept.
Smokeskin wrote:
Note that I wrote "mining lasers", not "a mining laser". You could oversee much more equipment if you operated at x60 speed. A lot of automation requiring human oversight also has to be slowed down to allow for the abysmally slow human reactions compared to the speed that machinery can move at.
Even then, you're looking at a lot of limitations. A person within an accelerated simulspace is confined to remotely controlling those systems, which limit the ways that they can interact with the tools they are using. They cannot jam, they cannot sleeve, and they cannot operate that machinery outside of radio range (which might be extremely limiting in an atmosphere like Venus's. An indenture sleeved in a synth is completely autonomous and able to move all about the planet, even if communication fails. If communication fails on a teleoperating miner, he just lost some mining equipment.
Smokeskin wrote:
Are you really saying that if human thought was sped up x60 (and the processing power and bandwidth compared to today increased by many orders of magnitude) stuff like the open trading hours would stay on a 24 hour cycle?
No, it wouldn't, but it certainly wouldn't stay active all the time. A permanently-on trading system wouldn't possibly work, even with digital entities operating in it. You know how I know? Because digital entities already dominate NASDAQ, and [i]no one wants to switch to an always-open market[/i]. It would completely kill the after-hours trading scene, and largely destroy the ability for humans to interact with the market. Because even at x60 speed, there is no way you can possibly compete with an AI specifically built for trading. They're probably running a hundred to a thousand times faster than that.
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Transhumans will one day be the Luddites of the posthuman age. [url=http://bit.ly/2p3wk7c]Help me get my gaming fix, if you want.[/url]
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Sun, 2012-06-10 14:04
Geonis Geonis's picture
Re: No limit limited Technology, Synthmorph, Infomorph
A few things, simulspace servers are not exactly portable. Ectos or Mesh inserts won't have the power to run these. Personal computers don't even have the power to run these programs. Servers are still used, however are not portable. Ones running high-end simulspaces will more than likely require hard wiring into it, to prevent VR dumpshock for their users. Also, 60 times speed dilation is the perk of transhumanity at the current moment, meaning it is the high-end tech. (page 243) Meaning it is not at everyday use availability. One could infer that basic simulspace requires a server to be ran on, higher end simulspace will require even stronger computing power.
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You could oversee much more equipment if you operated at x60 speed. A lot of automation requiring human oversight also has to be slowed down to allow for the abysmally slow human reactions compared to the speed that machinery can move at.
To this, a Delta fork will do it quite easier and more efficiently. A beta fork if you require even more knowledge. An AI could probably oversee it just fine. Hypercorps are small and agile. They don't have the huge amount of employees. Having 2 mining lasers or 20, you only need one person skilled at maintenance to maintain them all already. Instead of maintaining a non-portable server to run one simulspace, you have each laser monitored by a custom AI reporting to a central AI, or group, will be far more efficient and flexible being that each AI can be housed with the laser quite easily.
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Who says you need extremely powerful server clusters for it? Nothing indicates that it is especially difficult or expensive, it is even mentioned as being used for simple recreational purposes.
Page 247
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PERIPHERALS ... AIs and infomorphs are incapable of running on peripherals,
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PERSONAL COMPUTERS ... Personal computers may run one AI or infomorph at a time. They may not run simulspace programs.
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SERVERS ... They are capable of handling hundreds of users, multiple AIs and infomorphs, and they may run simulspace programs.
You jack into the simulspace node, this coming with subscription fees. (Page 331). Sometimes even going to cafes to use the pods. (page 241). Keep in mind these are for normal simulspace subscriptions, not state-of-the-art ones. I think you just are under some misunderstandings of what a simulspace was. It is not an end-user ran application by all indications I have come across. Honestly, there are more economically viable/flexible options.
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Sun, 2012-06-10 14:15
Smokeskin Smokeskin's picture
Re: No limit limited Technology, Synthmorph, Infomorph
Decivre wrote:
But your argument solely rests on the idea that this is inconsistent, as you are working under the claim that accelerated biological minds are impossible.
No it does not depend on the claim that accelerating biological minds are impossible. Not only is it obvious, I even specifically pointed that out. Biological minds just becomes more or less pointless, as they're going to be spending all their time (work and recreation) in simulspace anyway they might as well go infomorph.
Decivre wrote:
Not 60 times more expensive... hardware doesn't scale like that. You would need a processor that can clock 60 times the calculations in the same period of time. In comparison to today, if a 3 GHz processor was needed for a realtime simulation, you would need a 180 GHz processor for an x60 simulation (assuming the same instruction set).
You're applying the numbers backwards. In EP, simulspace can run minds accelerated at x60, so that's the 3 GHz baseline. To run a single mind, you'd need 50 MHZ. Anyways, let's call it quits. There's obviously a huge gap between how we understand pretty much everything. I doubt we can bridge it.
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Sun, 2012-06-10 15:46
Decivre Decivre's picture
Re: No limit limited Technology, Synthmorph, Infomorph
Smokeskin wrote:
No it does not depend on the claim that accelerating biological minds are impossible. Not only is it obvious, I even specifically pointed that out. Biological minds just becomes more or less pointless, as they're going to be spending all their time (work and recreation) in simulspace anyway they might as well go infomorph.
Says who? You are working solely under the assumption that people want to spend their time in simulspace. There are a ridiculous number of hurdles for this in the first place, not the least of which is the fact that the majority of society exists in the meat. Even infomorphs are generally forced to do work for people on the outside; even doing such mind-numbing work as operating the locks on a single door. Your logic is unsound. Just because simulspace is fast does not make it the only means of productivity. By that logic, everyone today uses air travel because it is faster than land travel... ergo, cars by your logic are extinct. Yet we both know that's ludicrous.
Smokeskin wrote:
You're applying the numbers backwards. In EP, simulspace can run minds accelerated at x60, so that's the 3 GHz baseline. To run a single mind, you'd need 50 MHZ. Anyways, let's call it quits. There's obviously a huge gap between how we understand pretty much everything. I doubt we can bridge it.
Correction: in EP, [i]the fastest simulspaces[/i] can run minds accelerated at x60. That does not mean all of them will (and it's likely the majority don't... that would be like saying "every videogame utilizes high definition and mind-numbing 3d graphics"). I might even go so far as to say that it is possible for simulspaces to go faster, but x60 is the upper cap for biological brains before damage starts to occur. Or it might only be the cap that they've achieved before requiring Seed-AI grade systems. And even if your gauge is the one by which EP measures the setting, then mesh inserts are ridiculously weak... one mesh inserts system can only handle a single ego and whatever peripheral programs, putting the system at a clockspeed of likely around 90 MHz in your measure (slightly under what is necessary for two minds). Are you seriously telling me that can run a powerful simulspace?
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Transhumans will one day be the Luddites of the posthuman age. [url=http://bit.ly/2p3wk7c]Help me get my gaming fix, if you want.[/url]
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Sun, 2012-06-10 16:48
Pyrite Pyrite's picture
Re: No limit limited Technology, Synthmorph, Infomorph
Smokeskin][quote=Decivre wrote:
You're applying the numbers backwards. In EP, simulspace can run minds accelerated at x60, so that's the 3 GHz baseline. To run a single mind, you'd need 50 MHZ.
I think this is the big sticking point here: x60 is treated in the book as the fastest that transhuman engineers have achieved. and yet everyone acts like that's what's commonly available. Even the Lost project was only running in like x6 acceleration, giving them 18 years in a 3 year span.
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'No language is justly studied merely as an aid to other purposes. It will in fact better serve other purposes, philological or historical, when it is studied for love, for itself.' --J.R.R. Tolkien
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Sun, 2012-06-10 19:51
Clunker Clunker's picture
Re: No limit limited Technology, Synthmorph, Infomorph
Geonis wrote:
A few things, simulspace servers are not exactly portable. Ectos or Mesh inserts won't have the power to run these. Personal computers don't even have the power to run these programs. Servers are still used, however are not portable. Ones running high-end simulspaces will more than likely require hard wiring into it, to prevent VR dumpshock for their users.
So what, exactly, would a a Simulspace need for proper hardware to run? Would a Quantum Computer be able to run a Simulspace? Or is the 'smallest' chunk of hardware a Simulspace can run on is a Server? I was always confused as to what hardware a Simulspace would need to run. Back when I was first tinkering with EP's ruleset, I'd made a Engineer AGI who intended to make a 'batcave' of sorts, and one of the things he/it was needing was a 'self-sustaining' Simulspace for coding and blueprint-writing... In the end, what WOULD be the least-expensive hardware to run a 'full-power' x60 Dilation-Capable Simulspace?
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Sun, 2012-06-10 20:48
Geonis Geonis's picture
Re: No limit limited Technology, Synthmorph, Infomorph
Clunker wrote:
So what, exactly, would a a Simulspace need for proper hardware to run? Would a Quantum Computer be able to run a Simulspace? Or is the 'smallest' chunk of hardware a Simulspace can run on is a Server? I was always confused as to what hardware a Simulspace would need to run. Back when I was first tinkering with EP's ruleset, I'd made a Engineer AGI who intended to make a 'batcave' of sorts, and one of the things he/it was needing was a 'self-sustaining' Simulspace for coding and blueprint-writing... In the end, what WOULD be the least-expensive hardware to run a 'full-power' x60 Dilation-Capable Simulspace?
Honestly, best to talk it over with your GM, let your intentions be known what you want to gain from it. Just let people know before hand, no one likes being blindsided. "Now that I have this high powered server, I am making a TITAN slave!" would hardly go over well. Also keep in mind how other players will receive the concept, the end goal of the game is for everyone to have fun. If one character/player is to much of a distraction, it can be an issue. There are far more easier ways to acquire the same goal, Forks working on blueprints while your doing other things are far less resource intensive. If it is for a concept reason, "I don't want forks because of X, but only want the same effect as if using forks." I hardly think there will be an issue, rules can be house ruled to work with it. Having to visit a psychosurgeon to make sure no damage took place in the highly experimental simulspace seems fitting. (Hand waving the fact normally damage is after the roll, instead of pre-existing.) In the end, it is a case-by-case basis.
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Mon, 2012-06-11 06:02
Decivre Decivre's picture
Re: No limit limited Technology, Synthmorph, Infomorph
Clunker wrote:
So what, exactly, would a a Simulspace need for proper hardware to run? Would a Quantum Computer be able to run a Simulspace? Or is the 'smallest' chunk of hardware a Simulspace can run on is a Server? I was always confused as to what hardware a Simulspace would need to run. Back when I was first tinkering with EP's ruleset, I'd made a Engineer AGI who intended to make a 'batcave' of sorts, and one of the things he/it was needing was a 'self-sustaining' Simulspace for coding and blueprint-writing... In the end, what WOULD be the least-expensive hardware to run a 'full-power' x60 Dilation-Capable Simulspace?
Unfortunately, there is a lot of tech that has not yet been showcased in the books. Server clusters, desktop computers, mainframes, quantum mainframes, quantum servers... the only things that have been showcased are quantum desktop computers, mesh inserts and ectos. That's a very small glimpse into the computer tech that must exist. As I mentioned before, simulspaces take a lot of processing to make function. They have to simulate a multitude of physics, and render a massive number of objects simultaneously in real-time. Furthermore, unlike videogames, they cannot de-render unused game space. When running at 60 times the speed, they have to do all of this [i]60 times as fast[/i]. To give you an idea of how hard this is, today we use supercomputers to render simulations [i]of single proteins running exponentially slower than real time[/i]. Most simulations today take shortcuts by de-rendering elements of a game world, or not simulating all forms of physics that might exist. Flight sims will handle Bernoulli's principle and gravity like a champ, but will largely ignore all other elements of physics as they are not needed. A simulation that had to simulate all those elements would be taxed to an insane degree, especially since it has to do so across an entire populated world (whereas a sim need only do so within the surroundings of the actor). So one has to imagine that the computing power necessary for that big a world must be immense, capable of handling an insane amount of variables and rapidly pushing output rendered for every bit of input it takes in. That means reacting to every single action that a person within the simulspace does... from walking to clinching your butthole, the simulspace has to render it and every sensory output that entails. Those sorts of systems aren't even discussed in the books yet. But I imagine it to be at least a quantum mainframe, if not a quantum server cluster. Quantum computers can better handle physics calculations (as they handle data superpositions... which are theorized to be crucial to accurate simulation) and are capable of handling vastly larger numbers than a digital computer can. A good simulspace likely demands quantum computing.
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Transhumans will one day be the Luddites of the posthuman age. [url=http://bit.ly/2p3wk7c]Help me get my gaming fix, if you want.[/url]
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Tue, 2012-06-12 04:33
Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture
Re: No limit limited Technology, Synthmorph, Infomorph
Clunker wrote:
Would a Quantum Computer be able to run a Simulspace? Or is the 'smallest' chunk of hardware a Simulspace can run on is a Server?
My view is that you can run a simulspace on an ecto, but it would be a very slow and low-quality simulspace. Like playing a first person shooter on your phone. I seem to recall that the core book mentions stationary computers (like a desktop) as enough for running a big multiuser simspace with presumably convincing environments. Presumably that is what you would use for normal entertainment uses and some speedup, but not the extreme massive multiplayer or x60 simspaces. In most situations you don't need to think about this, since it just magically runs "in the cloud". I doubt quantum computers are that useful for simspaces: unless there are some particular quantum algorithms that help rendering the environment, they are just normal computers (in fact, very specialised computers with non-standard hardware: expect compatibility issues). If I wanted to run a very fast or large simspace I probably need a bigger computer cluster - but it might still fit under a desk or two. Mainframes are (beside illegality) problematic from a scaling perspective: you can't distribute your ego across all their processors unless you have a seriously weird architecture (oh, AGI, I forgot :-) - and this is of course another reason to be circumspect, since AGIs running big hardware are a prime target of mobs with torches, pitchforks and artillery support these days). The batcave would likely be more like a batcloset - which might allow it to hide better, anyway.
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Extropian
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Tue, 2012-06-12 05:14
Smokeskin Smokeskin's picture
Re: No limit limited Technology, Synthmorph, Infomorph
Decivre wrote:
Smokeskin wrote:
You're applying the numbers backwards. In EP, simulspace can run minds accelerated at x60, so that's the 3 GHz baseline. To run a single mind, you'd need 50 MHZ. Anyways, let's call it quits. There's obviously a huge gap between how we understand pretty much everything. I doubt we can bridge it.
Correction: in EP, [i]the fastest simulspaces[/i] can run minds accelerated at x60. That does not mean all of them will (and it's likely the majority don't... that would be like saying "every videogame utilizes high definition and mind-numbing 3d graphics").
The argument doesn't hinge on the x60 speed. At x20, x10, x5, the case still holds. If state of the art is x60, then what about a mere 10% of that? We can agree that must be trivial, can't we? That's x6 speed. Trying to land a job where you can take your time off in real space would be like asking for a job where you only work 1 day a week. So you have infomorph employees working full time, and people sleeved in physical morphs working just one day a week. Who do you think will dominate in the workforce? Do you think CEOs (many of whom we know are perfectly willing to sacrifice health and personal life to satisfy their ambition and drive) will work and recreate in simulspace and get 6 times as much work done? What sort of CEO do you think the board of directors will hire, the one that works 6 times as much or the one that works at realtime speed? When the CEO selects the people to work with, do you think he wants people that also work on x6 speed like him? Do you think he'll hire people that take their time off in simulspace at x6 speeds, or do you think he'll hire people that only log into simulspace to work every 6 days of his subjective time? You can continue the line of reasoning on your own. When you then factor in that not only is there a huge competitive advantage in never living in realtime but that the cost of living in simulspace as an infomorph is much cheaper than having a physical body, that just makes it even clearer that infomorphs will dominate.
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Tue, 2012-06-12 07:11
Decivre Decivre's picture
Re: No limit limited Technology, Synthmorph, Infomorph
Arenamontanus wrote:
My view is that you can run a simulspace on an ecto, but it would be a very slow and low-quality simulspace. Like playing a first person shooter on your phone. I seem to recall that the core book mentions stationary computers (like a desktop) as enough for running a big multiuser simspace with presumably convincing environments. Presumably that is what you would use for normal entertainment uses and some speedup, but not the extreme massive multiplayer or x60 simspaces. In most situations you don't need to think about this, since it just magically runs "in the cloud".
A videogame and a simulspace are likely going to still be two very different things in Eclipse Phase's time. A simulspace is a simulated reality, coalescing all the simulated physics and object representation under a massive rendering system. A vidgame, however, can severely reduce the mechanics of reality to whatever's necessary in order to produce entertainment. For instance, because a vidgame has only one operator within the confines of the game, the system need only visually render anything that is within visual range of the player. It also needs to only audibly render anything that the player would be able to hear. Everything else could be de-rendered to save on processor power. Such shortcuts wouldn't be so easy when there are multiple actors within the system. A simulspace might have a dozen to hundred of people all operating within it, and need to render everything that any one of them might sense or interact with. That has the potential to eat an insane amount of resources. Admittedly though, trends are starting to show that the future of gaming may not include games on your computer at all. It's very possible that in the very close future (as we approach complete distribution of the internet over the world), most games will be cloud-based. At which point the power of your home computer means diddly with regards to the games that it can play. All that matters is the fidelity of the connection.
Arenamontanus wrote:
I doubt quantum computers are that useful for simspaces: unless there are some particular quantum algorithms that help rendering the environment, they are just normal computers (in fact, very specialised computers with non-standard hardware: expect compatibility issues). If I wanted to run a very fast or large simspace I probably need a bigger computer cluster - but it might still fit under a desk or two. Mainframes are (beside illegality) problematic from a scaling perspective: you can't distribute your ego across all their processors unless you have a seriously weird architecture (oh, AGI, I forgot :-) - and this is of course another reason to be circumspect, since AGIs running big hardware are a prime target of mobs with torches, pitchforks and artillery support these days). The batcave would likely be more like a batcloset - which might allow it to hide better, anyway.
Quantum computers have one major advantage over normal computers... the handling of massive numbers. 3d objects are rendered using floating-point integers to represent vector points in three-dimensional space. The larger the floating-point integer (in digits, not value), the higher the degree of fidelity and accuracy. Those same floating-point integers are crucial to physics simulations, probabilistic calculation, and a multitude of other complex problems. And when it comes to floating-point integers, quantum computers theoretically handle them incalculably better than a normal computer. For example, let's say you had a quantum computer that had 64-qubit processor... meaning it could natively process values up to 64 qubits long. In order to have a traditional computer capable of handling the same size value, it would need to be a [i]16 exabyte processor[/i]. Then you have to think about storage space (64 qubits of space on quantum RAM, as opposed to 16 exabytes of space on traditional RAM... [i]for a single value[/i]), and the speed at which it can calculate through that data. Yeah, quantum computing is probably necessary for actual simulspaces. I imagine that classic digital computing is now relegated to low-end servers and personal computing (ectos and mesh inserts). I see simple servers with relatively small or slow simspaces that will be about the size of a modern gaming console. Since the personal computer of the future is the ecto, I have no doubt that the size of the server will shrink equally. That means that the future high-end supercomputer will likely be the size of the master bathroom in a standard home. Or maybe just the full volume of a walk-in closet.
Smokeskin wrote:
The argument doesn't hinge on the x60 speed. At x20, x10, x5, the case still holds. If state of the art is x60, then what about a mere 10% of that? We can agree that must be trivial, can't we? That's x6 speed. Trying to land a job where you can take your time off in real space would be like asking for a job where you only work 1 day a week.
I don't think that's necessarily trivial. The fastest computer today slightly tops 10 petaflops, which means that 10% of that capability is about 1 petaflop... well beyond anything most people have in their homes, and probably more powerful than the majority of business systems. In fact, the server I used to work on operated at 300 teraflops... and the GPU of a high end gaming rig today operates at a little over 500 gigaflops. That's [sup]1[/sup]/[sub]20,000[/sub] the power of the most powerful computer. So if the most powerful computer today could run a 60x simulation, a high-end desktop could run a [sup]1[/sup]/[sub]333[/sub] speed simulspace. Microfractions of the speed of the slowest simulspaces within the setting.
Smokeskin wrote:
So you have infomorph employees working full time, and people sleeved in physical morphs working just one day a week. Who do you think will dominate in the workforce? Do you think CEOs (many of whom we know are perfectly willing to sacrifice health and personal life to satisfy their ambition and drive) will work and recreate in simulspace and get 6 times as much work done? What sort of CEO do you think the board of directors will hire, the one that works 6 times as much or the one that works at realtime speed? When the CEO selects the people to work with, do you think he wants people that also work on x6 speed like him? Do you think he'll hire people that take their time off in simulspace at x6 speeds, or do you think he'll hire people that only log into simulspace to work every 6 days of his subjective time? You can continue the line of reasoning on your own. When you then factor in that not only is there a huge competitive advantage in never living in realtime but that the cost of living in simulspace as an infomorph is much cheaper than having a physical body, that just makes it even clearer that infomorphs will dominate.
But again, this is all assuming that your company has access to the simulspace capacities necessary to gain that edge. I don't imagine it's very common, and in fact I work under the assumption that simulspace averages on the slow side. A common simulspace probably operates at around 80% realtime (I work under the assumption that most simulspaces aren't put together by pros and hypercorps), maybe a little faster. 1x is likely the benchmark standard for a simulspace system. To me, 60x simulspaces are the equivalent of Ultraviolet nodes in Shadowrun... mythical in scope, with few people ever catching glimpse of one. I highly doubt that the most powerful simulspace servers in human civilization are a dime a dozen. As a frame of reference, the simulspace servers used in Project Futura (the Lost) ran at about 6x speed in order to allow the subjects to mentally grow at the same pace as their accelerated-growth bodies.
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Transhumans will one day be the Luddites of the posthuman age. [url=http://bit.ly/2p3wk7c]Help me get my gaming fix, if you want.[/url]
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Tue, 2012-06-12 19:04
Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture
Re: No limit limited Technology, Synthmorph, Infomorph
On the topic of the economic impact of simspace acceleration, I think the likely answer is: huge. An accelerated worker will produce more per unit of time. Speeding him up by a factor X will increase his labour productivity by a corresponding factor (possibly less than X due to the need for breaks, overhead, costs of fast hardware etc.) A x60 factor is roughly the increase in productivity of post-WWII Japan to modern high-tech Japan. Beside the higher productivity per day the worker can also complete projects faster and adapt to changed circumstances faster. He might demand a X times higher salary, but these extra factors are still valuable to the employer. Hence, companies (and individuals) running fast will have big competitive advantages all other things being equal. An economy where everybody is running equally fast will be indistinguishable from the inside from a normal one: there is no advantage. But even a slight speed advantage will be profitable if it is not overly costly, and hence there will be a race for ever greater advantages. Similarly for individuals competing with each other. Note that forking is even more radical: it provides more human capital (you can get more skilled people, and without the cost of rearing and educating them), wage competition between forks make it cheaper, and there could be synergies of rare experts or forked teams where group cognition is exploited. Speeding up egos gives you up to X times more human capital per second, forking can give you an arbitrary amount more - including extra rare super-skilled people. Keeping EP "normal" and maintaining hard economics is tricky. Legal and cultural limits might make speeding and forking rarer than they should be, but this will likely shift over time for the above economic reasons.
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Tue, 2012-06-12 19:40
Geonis Geonis's picture
Re: No limit limited Technology, Synthmorph, Infomorph
@Arenamontanus, From our stand point, I won't disagree it would not be huge. However, while not well versed in economics, wouldn't the law of diminishing returns be applied? All we are doing with a simulspace is increasing mental time for person[s], other factors apply and would need to be boosted to actually accommodate that increase. As I see it, external stimulus is needed for proper growth in innovation, creativity and other human cognitive factors. Sticking a painter in a 60 times simulspace wouldn't guarantee a master piece in my eyes, no matter how much time he actually has in there, it might even have a negative effect (Pure conjecture I'll admit). I have my doubts a 60 times simulspace would even reach 10 to 15 fold increase. These are just my views on it. I do agree that forks, AI and AGIs (Viewed as property in some areas, from my understanding) would make a more cost efficient tool than a simulspace.
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Tue, 2012-06-12 21:30
DivineWrath DivineWrath's picture
Re: No limit limited Technology, Synthmorph, Infomorph
Geonis wrote:
However, while not well versed in economics, wouldn't the law of diminishing returns be applied?
I've taken some courses in economics. Let me help you. To double the effectiveness of 60x acceleration, you would need 120x acceleration. In addition, chances are that the resources needed to produce another 1x increase in acceleration would likely be greater than the last. A good economist would thus notice that the resources needed to run that last 10x acceleration might allow the company to run a half a dozen, or more projects. In the end, it it matters what you are willing to pay for. If you must have the very best, expect people to gouge you, or that there may be some serious expense in get someone to design and build something for you.
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Tue, 2012-06-12 23:54
Pyrite Pyrite's picture
Re: No limit limited Technology, Synthmorph, Infomorph
I think the main question is what kind of work do you figure most transhumans do? The way I see it, not many positions gain a benefit from effectively being locked in a room for weeks.
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'No language is justly studied merely as an aid to other purposes. It will in fact better serve other purposes, philological or historical, when it is studied for love, for itself.' --J.R.R. Tolkien
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Wed, 2012-06-13 02:04
King Shere King Shere's picture
Re: No limit limited Technology, Synthmorph, Infomorph
Its not solitary confinement, unless something prevents simulspace "confined" people from interacting with others in the same "timeframe" even if its just messaging. Psychosurgery should help the therapy for the bad psychological effects isolation causes. As soon as there are simulspaces that could accommodate a population of users, society might take residence there -then its those that are outside simulspaces that are at a disadvantage. I got the impression that the vast majority of egos are infomorphs, which gives the impression that the majority of society have been transfered into simulspace and settle there. But for those that find to much dead time, or waiting, there exist the simulspaces that make time pass faster, thus the waiting becomes shorter.
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[img]http://boxall.no-ip.org/img/tc_userbar.jpg[/img] [img]http://boxall.no-ip.org/img/exh_userbar.jpg[/img] [img]http://boxall.no-ip.org/img/argo_userbar.jpg[/img] [i]"To find fault is easy; to do better may be difficult."[/i] Plutarch
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Wed, 2012-06-13 02:45
Tyrnis Tyrnis's picture
Re: No limit limited Technology, Synthmorph, Infomorph
King Shere wrote:
I got the impression that the vast majority of egos are infomorphs, which gives the impression that the majority of society have been transfered into simulspace and settle there.
There are a large number of infomorphs in total, but by and large they're the people who are too poor/unskilled to afford physical bodies and whose current indenture position doesn't give them a temporary one. They're also very much a minority. The vast number of egos you may be thinking of are the ones in inactive storage that are being drawn from to support the continuation of the indenture system. We have the most information so far on Mars, and here's the numbers for it: Olympus and Valles-New Shanghai (transhumanity's most populous city) both have 2% infomorphs, Noctis-Qianjiao and Ashoka are at 5%, while Elysium and Progress have 10%.
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Wed, 2012-06-13 04:51
Decivre Decivre's picture
Re: No limit limited Technology, Synthmorph, Infomorph
Arenamontanus wrote:
On the topic of the economic impact of simspace acceleration, I think the likely answer is: huge. An accelerated worker will produce more per unit of time. Speeding him up by a factor X will increase his labour productivity by a corresponding factor (possibly less than X due to the need for breaks, overhead, costs of fast hardware etc.) A x60 factor is roughly the increase in productivity of post-WWII Japan to modern high-tech Japan. Beside the higher productivity per day the worker can also complete projects faster and adapt to changed circumstances faster. He might demand a X times higher salary, but these extra factors are still valuable to the employer. Hence, companies (and individuals) running fast will have big competitive advantages all other things being equal. An economy where everybody is running equally fast will be indistinguishable from the inside from a normal one: there is no advantage. But even a slight speed advantage will be profitable if it is not overly costly, and hence there will be a race for ever greater advantages. Similarly for individuals competing with each other.
I don't see this as necessarily being the case. There are many jobs where isolation in a simulspace may not help for production, even with time acceleration. Artists might suffer, especially if they use their daily lives as inspiration for their work. A simulspace will limit the amount of potential material they might encounter, unless they are within some sort of simulspace city or social environment. Plus, there are other potentially more-effective ways to utilize that much processor power. The same computer that can run a high-speed simulspace can probably run several million AI clusters for an insane multitude of jobs. I could see massive collectives of factories that are wirelessly connected to an AI databank that controls and guides every single machine within all of the factories in the network. Excess processing power could be used to hone and optimized the pre-programmed motions of the AIs, reducing the likelihood of defective products and smoothing out performance. Plus, there are other uses for simulation that don't necessitate a simulspace with users. Hypercorps likely use simulated environments to "field-test" their products before a prototype is ever even built. Tests on virtual representations of objects and materials give them a good idea of how well something will perform, which can then be tested against the actual product later when they actually create the design. I imagine that this process is also a key element in perfecting the simulspace process, creating virtual worlds that function nearly identical to our own.
Arenamontanus wrote:
Note that forking is even more radical: it provides more human capital (you can get more skilled people, and without the cost of rearing and educating them), wage competition between forks make it cheaper, and there could be synergies of rare experts or forked teams where group cognition is exploited. Speeding up egos gives you up to X times more human capital per second, forking can give you an arbitrary amount more - including extra rare super-skilled people. Keeping EP "normal" and maintaining hard economics is tricky. Legal and cultural limits might make speeding and forking rarer than they should be, but this will likely shift over time for the above economic reasons.
I actually see this as being a more economical and reasonable use of processor power than simulspace. An ego in Eclipse Phase takes up a relatively small amount of processing power (most of a personal computer system's resources), and so could very easily be emulated in bulk on a much larger system. The same system that could run a simulspace for several hundred people could probably run several hundred-thousand egos within the same amount of resources. Plus, while there are plenty of legal limitations regarding forking, it probably isn't considered so bad when you are using those forks within the context of a confined computer system for the use of a think tank. Even if forks are socially unacceptable, they are probably fairly acceptable when trapped in a digital system and pressed to do work. In this regard, I think you'll find it more likely for hypercorp executives to be walking about all the time doing very little, while alpha and beta forks of themselves are doing the brunt of the work that they would normally be tasked with.
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Transhumans will one day be the Luddites of the posthuman age. [url=http://bit.ly/2p3wk7c]Help me get my gaming fix, if you want.[/url]
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Wed, 2012-06-13 05:01
Decivre Decivre's picture
Re: No limit limited Technology, Synthmorph, Infomorph
King Shere wrote:
Its not solitary confinement, unless something prevents simulspace "confined" people from interacting with others in the same "timeframe" even if its just messaging. Psychosurgery should help the therapy for the bad psychological effects isolation causes. As soon as there are simulspaces that could accommodate a population of users, society might take residence there -then its those that are outside simulspaces that are at a disadvantage.
There is a difference between infomorphs and simulmorphs, and not all in-system interaction is going to be with a virtual environment. The largest majority of an infomorph's time will be completely disembodied, with some sort of digital interface for interacting with a network. No simulation is required for this to occur. If you want a simple description of what life is like as an infomorph, think about your computer monitor. Now imagine that your computer monitor completely fills out your field of vision, and you can't turn away (an infomorph has no neck). Now imagine that your computer's sound system completely floods your ears and you can hear nothing that doesn't come through your computer's audio output (like having headphones. Now imagine that you have no arms or legs (or body for that matter), and you can interact with your computer with pure thought. That's probably what being an infomorph is like. No simulspace, just interface.
King Shere wrote:
I got the impression that the vast majority of egos are infomorphs, which gives the impression that the majority of society have been transfered into simulspace and settle there.
I actually think this is not the case. The majority of infomorphs are likely too poor and don't have the necessary connections to get access to any simulspaces. Those that are working for hypercorp dime are probably only allowed access to simulspace for necessary purposes, like product testing. Most simulspaces are likely for network games (the future MMO), simulated worlds for wealthy escapists or outer system-ers that have the rep, or sim systems for business purposes (military sims, product testing, virtual research).
King Shere wrote:
But for those that find to much dead time, or waiting, there exist the simulspaces that make time pass faster, thus the waiting becomes shorter.
These might be more common than accelerated simspace, if only because they are far easier to run.
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Transhumans will one day be the Luddites of the posthuman age. [url=http://bit.ly/2p3wk7c]Help me get my gaming fix, if you want.[/url]
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Wed, 2012-06-13 05:18
Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture
Re: No limit limited Technology, Synthmorph, Infomorph
Geonis wrote:
However, while not well versed in economics, wouldn't the law of diminishing returns be applied?
Yes, of course. There is a maximum economical speed to run egos for a particular job. Updating insurance premiums doesn't have the same time constraints as being first with the next blockbuster game. My point is simply that a simple multiplier of productivity is a *very* big deal. Any group not pursuing it will be outcompeted (unless it is in a peculiar niche). Note that a speeded up workplace can be creative and social: the designers work together in teams, run simulations and order real world tests. Then they go on a "holiday" while the tests are done, coming back refreshed and eager for new challenges just as the data is in. Different teams can in principle run at different speeds if it is compatible with the workflow ("Amp up team Lyon to 76, we need their data before Newcastle finishes. Take the cycles from Milan - we are a distance from the marketing campaign yet.") Negotiating how to handle variable speed and real world free time is likely a big part of contract negotiations for professionals in EP.
Quote:
I do agree that forks, AI and AGIs (Viewed as property in some areas, from my understanding) would make a more cost efficient tool than a simulspace.
For some tasks. Real world naivete is something you definitely don't want in your marketing campaign. And running a lot of AGIs makes people antsy - you might have to fend off a lot of government inspectors doing safety checks. Forks raise a lot of issues. But they allow some amazing forms of collaboration. Imagine taking *all* possible combinations of your engineering team, running them in separate simspaces to come up with alternative solutions (working alone, working in pairs, triples etc.) and then merging them together for evaluating the proposals. Even with betas this allows a lot of creativity. You could even have a scoring system behind the scenes, noting which combinations produce the best outcomes on average. Note that this might even be seen as a good way of doing projects by the engineers (rather than seeing it as a way of squeezing man-hours out of them) since it allows better creative work and nobody feeling their ideas were not considered. The cutting-edge workplace in EP is likely to be surreal and not for people attached to oldfashioned senses of identity. That might slow the adaptation of these practices, but it doesn't stop the economic pressures: if Cognite consistently has better, more creative and faster solutions than their competitors, then their methods are going to be imitated.
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Wed, 2012-06-13 05:15
Pyrite Pyrite's picture
Re: No limit limited Technology, Synthmorph, Infomorph
Decivre wrote:
I actually think this is not the case. The majority of infomorphs are likely too poor and don't have the necessary connections to get access to any simulspaces. Those that are working for hypercorp dime are probably only allowed access to simulspace for necessary purposes, like product testing.
I personally figure that the average infomorph worker can afford to subscribe to one or two normal speed consumer grade simulspaces for entertainment during downtime periods. Of course this is because I feel that most indentures don't work 24/7 and have a small monthly stipend for entertainment built into their contracts, because hypercorps realize that pushing egos to the point of insanity through stress is counterproductive.
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'No language is justly studied merely as an aid to other purposes. It will in fact better serve other purposes, philological or historical, when it is studied for love, for itself.' --J.R.R. Tolkien
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Wed, 2012-06-13 06:18
Decivre Decivre's picture
Re: No limit limited Technology, Synthmorph, Infomorph
Pyrite wrote:
I personally figure that the average infomorph worker can afford to subscribe to one or two normal speed consumer grade simulspaces for entertainment during downtime periods. Of course this is because I feel that most indentures don't work 24/7 and have a small monthly stipend for entertainment built into their contracts, because hypercorps realize that pushing egos to the point of insanity through stress is counterproductive.
Not necessarily. An indenture going insane potentially means a violated contract that the hypercorp can void, resulting in a restoration of an earlier backup of that same indenture and a reset contract. In fact, this is touched on in the short story Melt, where indentures that are killed on the job are restored from before they ever agreed to the contract, and given a contract from scratch. And I can't imagine what happens to the indentures of say Ultimates, who are already forced to live in hobbled sleeves and serve their masters in a multitude of ways. Giving indentures any sort of entertainment is probably seen as an unnecessary use of resources.
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Transhumans will one day be the Luddites of the posthuman age. [url=http://bit.ly/2p3wk7c]Help me get my gaming fix, if you want.[/url]
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Wed, 2012-06-13 07:01
Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture
Re: No limit limited Technology, Synthmorph, Infomorph
Decivre wrote:
Giving indentures any sort of entertainment is probably seen as an unnecessary use of resources.
Ok, now you have frustrated and slightly unhinged people writing your security code or checking your marketing materials. What could possibly go wrong?
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