Sven Nord
Titan Science Officer
Iapetus Orbital Fleet
Recently a microcorp named Eden Info Dynamics has managed to push through the red tape we put in place in regards to Iapetus. They have quite a bit of Kroner behind them and and widespread grassroots support. They even have some support among the re claimers in the inner system.
Their plan is to re instantiate all the egos Luna keeps in cold storage in a hyper realistic simulation as infomorphs, using Iapetus 'computronium' to allow for unlimited storage and processing capacity. There has obviously been some concern regarding TITAN influencing or somehow taking control of the colony. There is also some concern over what those egos will do once they are instantiated. We are talking about 300-500 million egos in dead storage, most of them with few or no useful skills.
I feel as a humanitarian effort, it is to be lauded, but I remain skeptic of using anything having to do with TITAN construction. As far as we are able to discern, the computronium is inert, though a few exsurgents remain. Several cubic meters of computronium have been cut from the crust and utilized in a remote server habitat with limited external mesh access. The plan is to instantiate 10,000 to 40,000 egos in the temporary server, keeping it under observation until it is determined to be safe for more macro scale projects such as the one Eden has proposed.
What concerns me is not the computronium itself, but the nanomesh interface they are using to connect their hardware to it. Eden has made a very aggressive push in social media and is under pressure to deliver, it may have used further TITAN technology to establish an uplink. There are rumors the interface was desigend by an asych engineer, which is enough to give pause on its own.
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Iapetus Infomorph Habitation
Sun, 2017-12-24 18:10
#1
ringringlingling
Iapetus Infomorph Habitation
Tue, 2017-12-26 10:58
#2
Baribal
No... NO! No no no no nooooooo...
That is not going to happen. And if it will happen, it shouldn't. This is both a really bad idea, and then it's also going to get flak by other bad ideas. I'm all for reinstantiation, but this, woah...
Well, I for one *am* concerned. Even if it's inert now, which, given the spatial scale at which TITANs engineer such things, and how far human engineering is lagging behind, is quite an assumption, that doesn't mean that it's safe. Fill it with energy and data, and who knows what kind of booby traps will come crawling out of deeply buried registers! "Well, we've got this highly efficient alien computer lying around, so why not use it" is frankly a *horrible* argument, especially when we can make our own which may not be as efficient, and might require more effort to make, but at least would come with *some* guarantee to not be pre-subverted by TITANs.
But said effort brings us right to problem number 2.
You know who will not be cooperative with that? Luna. The Planetary Consortium. Heck, probably the Morningstar Alliance as well, and let's throw Extropia into the mix for good measure. Every faction that somehow has interactions with IndEx, and some of them would probably collapse without slavery. The driving force of indenture is the abundance of egos in cold storage, and that slavers who rifle through them for prospective human property can always go "Well, if you don't want to, that's okay, maybe the next will, good night." Nothing would make me happier than to see that particular atrocity come crashing down, but I doubt that PC hypercorps or mining operations on Venus and Mercury share my enthusiasm. And unlike most microcorps, and *definitely* unlike Scum and sundry like myself, those are stakeholders in the old economy, and shareholders in IndEx and equivalent Lunar operations, and they sure won't let go of their golden goose for a one-time payoff of anything less than multiplanetary scale.
Or have I missed someone down there suddenly becoming a transhumanitarian?
Well, so much for that. Without further ado, let's just go to problem numero 3.
Well, I'd say "existing and just enjoying their simulated life", because why the hell not? Assuming that this hair-brained scheme of a TITAN-built mass infomorph hub works out, what is it to stop from chugging along with minimal maintenance and upkeep efforts? Wasn't that the whole idea of, and I can't stress enough how my stomach would turn every time that I come upon that phrase, if I had a stomach right now, using a TITAN-built super-efficient supercomputer? Why and what for would they have to *do* anything? I myself was welcomed on board a barge with no more pressure than "Well, if you see something where you can and would like to help out, do so." We're finally living in the age of (partial, but significant) abundance, where to not just survive, but live reasonably comfortable, does not require more of you than being a zoopy frood whose mere presence doesn't annoy people. And then if you like to do something that makes lives around you just a little bit better, you're already on the plus side of life. It's only people socialized to old and transitional economics who think that people have to "do something productive" or have "marketable skills".
Sadly, those very people still form the bulk of transhumanity, and in particular would be the environment in which that infomorph superhub would be embedded. So to transfer out of it would probably come with a price, or require waiting in line for a long, long time, or whatever other arbitrary restrictions would be put on them. That hub would become a ghetto. Probably a ghetto that'd be nice to live in for those people who are happy with being info- or simulmorphs, but guess what; they're not the only kind of people that exist, and probably not even the majority. Heck, *I* wouldn't be happy as an infomorph if I didn't pseudo-embody quite a lot of the time.
But it gets worse. Because you know who else is socialized to old economics? The egos that we are talking about here. Autonomists are usually quite happy to take in newcomers and get them acclimatized to our way of living, but such a large influx would overwhelm *any* ability to do so. Moreover, that very self-abusive culture that those egos bring with them would sour the very notion of "existing and just enjoying their simulated life" that I started this section with, so there goes that last sliver of hope! Simulated Eden would turn into simulated Hades quite quickly, I assume, no TITAN interference required.
But just to round off this avalanche of awfulness:
Let me add another pause: What if some of the stored egos are asyncs? Wasn't that the thing that turned the Lost Generation into such a major clusterfuck? Some kind of "asyncs get antsy in infomorphs and then the screaming starts" complication? And considering that these egos saw the worst of the Fall, there's not even that small a chance that an inordinate amount of them are infected.
Or just, you know... traumatized. Where do we get the therapists to deal with 300M egos who just yesterday were ripped out of their lives and thrown ten years into the future? Do we mass deploy therapeutic AIs? Oh, wait, I've heard something about something like that being tried before... Oh, right! The Lost! Funny how that comes popping up again.
Okay, I'm done. For now. I bet that if I actually thought about this for a few minutes instead of just spewing the rant that comes to my mind *immediately* upon hearing of this plan, there'd be another bunch of problems I'd have with this. But since I don't want to be purely destructive, I'd like to point out an alternative or three, too.
Remember the rumor from a while ago [url=http://eclipsephase.com/casaclanka-real]about an operation called Casaclanka[/url]? Building infohubs, synths, and eventually biomorphs in a scalable fashion without needing to involve economies of scarcity, by starting small and scaling up organically? Once things hit the organic phase, and a sufficient supply of CHONs is allocated (Hey, Titanians, wanna pitch in?), I can help out, I've even started cooking up schematics for a low-resources splicer. Heck, I've even started sketching out simulspace for the first egos to get this thing rolling. But there's still quite a large gap in industrial engineering and automation, synth engineering, habitat bootstrapping, prospecting sites to get started... But frankly, I'd so much rather see people waste time and resources to get *that* rolling, than being sent to clean up the mess that Eden is likely to unleash.
—
Morgan's Butchery | Body bank, morph individualization and upgrades | Psychotherapy and Psychosurgery, therapeutic and recreational | http://eclipsephase.com/comment/59484#comment-59484
Tue, 2017-12-26 13:38
#3
DoomSmith
DROP Wrote:
Thanks to a fellow server member, I woke up this morning to the cybernetic equivalent of autistic screeching on my jabber over this idea. I'm tempted to join in their rancor. Even putting aside my personal views on Infolife, this cannot be a good idea.
All TITAN tech is poison. Nothing, save the imminent end of humanity as a whole, could ever justify utilizing it. We shouldn't be using it as a storage container. Instead, what we really should be doing is brainstorming ways to safely propel that blasted rock out of the bloody solar system, sending into the void where it bloody well belongs.
And here I thought Transhumanity just used those Muse programs for their mass-produced, personalized therapy AI's.
That said, I'm very interested in those Splicer schematics you mentioned. I have a few resource-bearing contacts who are in need of them. They are hurting for low-cost ways of giving refugee backups a Forever-Body.
Of course, it is worth bearing in mind that their causes are similar to my own. If you can stomach helping out a few Bioconservative factions, we might be able to make some progress on this front.
—
This message was sponsored by the GLORIOUS JOVIAN REPUBLIC!(TM)
Tue, 2017-12-26 18:49
#4
Baribal
DoomSmith wrote:Baribal wrote
No. Or, more specifically, not like that.
Most muses these days aren't the digital assistants of old, but pruned-down versions of AGIs (which is why every now and then you can see some decadent hyperelite, or me, sleeve them). They're given psychology and psychotherapeutic skills for two reasons: Bonding with their users (both as in "acting in a fashion that makes the muse enjoyable to interact with" and "making the interaction efficient by anticipating needs and how best to satisfy them"), and for self-maintenance. They're usually even more sparse than your average beta fork, and AGI alphas are usually sparsified transhuman alphas or constructs approximating them to begin with, so they're liable to deteriorate after a while, either by becoming more vapory or by becoming weird. Competent introspection skills and healthy mental habits help to stabilize them.
That being said, they do have those skills, and yes, they also do apply them to their users. They're competent at bonding, making them trusted confidants, and continuous low-key therapy intensifies that aspect of the user-muse interaction. They really do their best to be your most valuable friend. Of course, that also comes with that culture mainstreaming criticism that has been boiling up every now and then on Circle-@, and which seems to be excised from CivNet as soon as it pops up there. In an attempt to keep you happy and mentally healthy, muses ever so gently nudge you to be a good citizen of your society, thus entrenching the median of those societies and flattening its frayed edges where all the *interesting* people are. Or were.
HOWEVER (he said, after pontificating on a tangent for several paragraphs) all of that is very rudimentary, and definitely only about keeping a healthy mind healthy. In the worst case, a muse can notice that your mental state is going totally off the rails, and call for professional help. They are consciously empathetic, but they are no therapists. They are in no way equipped to deal with serious trauma in any capacity that goes beyond supporting outpatient care. What we are talking about here, with regard to the infolife hub, is hundreds of millions cases of severe PTSD, and that's just the peak of the iceberg. Given the number, there are bound to be a whole lot of very sick people in that population regardless of their recent trauma and reinstantiation, Oh, and that simulspace better be top notch, or we'll be adding sleeving-related disorders as well. I mean, more severe ones than usual. And with that whole shopping list, *now* we can start talking about *specific* abuses that the TITANs have visited upon some of these people. Or even the mere threat of TITANs. Anybody feel like letting a muse talk to someone who had to forcibly hold his screaming daughter down so that the nice ego bridge tech could suck her mind out of her skull for emergency farcasting? Because she didn't quite understand yet that that heap of motionless bodies, to which she thought she'd be added, was actually the sum of people who *did* manage to make it out? because if so, I'd REALLY like to use that muse! I've definitely seen that and similar scenes far too often when we desleeved people as rapidly as we could, before we had to resort to mass-in-vivo-stack-popping!
...
Okay, I guess you see the problem. I too am one of the ones that got out. Was forced out. I don't know if I would have evacuated if I had been given the choice. Now factor in that I'm actually one of the healthier ones. Of those 300M+, how many are regular, fully healthy backups, and not people who evacuated when the flying buzzsaws were on the horizon?
I don't see how they could be of help, seeing that they're optimized for vat growth and sleeving, which, if memory serves, is as opposed to what you'd support as can be. Not to mention that the Junta would probably react promptly and decisively to a lot of emaciated each-other-look-alikes appearing. Also, these schematics aren't for forever-bodies, they're for as-soon-as-possible-any-biomorph. They're the biological equivalent of case synths. And which are also in a very alpha stage, as I'm rather strapped for neuragenics right now, so I'm debugging the rest of the bodies by growing them as pod morphs. Oh, and I really wouldn't recommend trying to procreate with bodies like that, that wouldn't be healthy neither for mother nor for the child. But if that laundry list doesn't make you reconsider, here's what I have so far: [DOWNLOAD FILE] If you and your friends could submit patches and notes of your experiences with it back to me (or to public repos), that'd be swell.
—
Morgan's Butchery | Body bank, morph individualization and upgrades | Psychotherapy and Psychosurgery, therapeutic and recreational | http://eclipsephase.com/comment/59484#comment-59484
Tue, 2018-01-02 14:50
#5
ringringlingling
Don't you think you're being a bit paranoid?
They are only using the memory registers we found, after all. They have mapped out the circuitry to the nano-scale, there are no anomalies and they scanned the computronium several times. I'm sure this project bears watching, but calling in an OP team seems premature. I doubt that Titanian Security Ministry will allow the project to go forward.
Wed, 2018-01-03 02:36
#6
CordialUltimate2
Have they scanned the whole
Have they scanned the whole computronium they want to use?
Oh wait they couldn't have done that because Iapetus is infested by exsurgent TITAN monstrosities. Oh well, better start cleaning up against the will of PC, Titanians and other Autonomists.
But seriously seeing how advanced TITAN infowar capabilities are even a few micrograms of computronium could contain a deadly threat that when Iapetus was activated would develop into full fledged seed AI or something...
—
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Thu, 2018-01-04 13:57
#7
DoomSmith
DROP Wrote:
It depends on who you're talking to, especially in the Republic.
As for myself, my interests go beyond the scope of Jupiter. Additional biomorphs walking around is a win in my book. To you, they are cheap, easily discarded shells, but for me, they are people in a sea of machines and humming computers that merely have not woken up yet. Humans are a dying race to begin with- we cannot afford to be picky.
I'm getting off track with the original topic here, but with the right finnicking, there is some real potential in this idea from a bioconservative standpoint. All it requires is a little non-linear thinking.
There are a lot of irregularities with the human body that can be remedied with genefixing, and the Republic is one of the few places where there is still a high demand for such treatments. An unattractive appearance could be used to, say, incentivize newly sleeved Fall refugees into enlisting into the Jovian Republic. A society, mind you, that holds an established market for genefixing treatments with Nanobots that destroyed their home planet not included.
This, of course, would be the perfect pitch to many Jovian officials, particularly within the Military and the Jovian Reformist meme. Enough, I'd wager, to consider putting it into production on a testing scale at the least.
But again, that's thinking linearly. If, by chance, some rogue hacker were to find this idea an abhorrent exploitation of fundamental human rights, they might distribute a schematic for a packaged series of genefixing treatments that just-so-happen to match the corners a low-cost splicer makes in being produced. They'd just have to save up enough to have it fabbed and no one would be the wiser.
Of course, this is all speculation. Your schematic might not fit the bill exactly, but it is a step in the right direction. It might be a good starting point for some friends of mine.
You underestimate TITAN technology. What if the specific arrangement of circutry is the basis for an undiscovered basilisk hack? What if the sensors used to map the registers are already compromised? What if there are subprograms in Iapetus monitoring all of this that will go active once fresh brains are loaded into the data-banks? The alleged Async they allowed to program this and the rushed nature of development is only the top of a mountain of concerns; the rabbit hole of potential calamities are bottomless.
The above hazards might sound like paranoid rambling to many, but if you survived the Fall, these are no more than the rules of engagement. Where TITAN tech is involved, nothing is foolproof. It is on a level of technology we do not yet understand. Everything from them should be treated like a doomsday device, and thankfully the Titanian Ministry of Defense agrees with my standpoint on this, but only for now and only publicly. There is no telling what the Plurality might be up to behind closed doors.
Overall, the fact that there is a whole moon of limitless, dormant TITAN tech, complete with scavengers perfectly poised to become the incipient of the next Exsurgent plague, keeps me up at night.
—
This message was sponsored by the GLORIOUS JOVIAN REPUBLIC!(TM)
Thu, 2018-01-04 18:42
#8
ringringlingling
Opportunity
Gentleman, I think we are missing out on an opportunity. If we can send a firewall agent in place of the infomorph they intend to upload into Iapetus as a test canidate, we may gather some intelligence on the Titan and Exsurgent threat. We might find out why they built the Mautroska brain or where they've buggered off to. We will also be in a position to pull the plug in case anything goes wrong.
We will have our agents positioned in the Titanian Fleet above armed with anti-matter warheads should the worse come to pass. I loath to think what might happen if we are forced to push the moon out of Saturns orbit.
Tue, 2018-01-16 07:19
#9
ShadowDragon8685
Login Location: Aarhus, Titan
[b]Login Location:[/b] Aarhus, Titan, Saturnine System
[b]i-Handle:[/b] Ezia
The whole concept at play here so far transcends the boundaries of 'bad idea' it verges on lunacy.
I cannot even believe this idea made it out of anyone's mesh inserts, let alone to the point of being allocated state resources.
No, by that I mean [i]literally[/i] do not believe any of this shit, and I'm unable to find any evidence that 'Eden Info Dynamics' or this second-most terrible idea behind quite literally reinstantiating a TITAN from backup straight into T.A.U's heavy iron cluster exists as anything more than the fever dream of someone who's pulling all of your chains.
I cannot find any evidence of a 'Sven Nord' holding any position as any form of Titanian 'science officer' (note: not a real rank,) nor of this insanity being in the works.
Just in the name of taking-zero-chances when poking the terrible TITAN gift to Titan, I'm making some indiscreet inquiries with some like-minded individuals who bat for another team at both the Science Police and Titanian Intel. Fortunately it's never hard for an actual maverick law enforcement officer to get someone to listen, especially in the vein of "something absurd and impossible came up in an unrelated investigation which is probably bullshit but on the off-chance it isn't someone needs to be acting on this." If there [i]is[/i] any such nonsense going on, there's an infinitesimally-close-to-zero chance that both Navy Intelligence [i]and[/i] the Science Police both signed off on it (at least an order of magnitude smaller chance than the already-infinitesimal chance one or the other [i]did[/i],) and someone will notice and begin cleaning house in short order.
Remember, friends, there's no reason to actually [i]do[/i] work if someone else is already champing at the bit to do it. Meanwhile, I have a feeling that this whole malarkey is either the result of someone taking a weeklong petals trip, or more likely is in the vein of trolling designed to test our ability to determine what's bollocks and what isn't.
—
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Tue, 2018-02-06 10:47
#10
Leng Plateau
Where does your mind live?
What makes you think
that your thinking
happens in
the substrate that
you think
your thinking
is in
For all you know
the TITANs never
left at all
welcome to
Iapetus simuspace
—
At least with Lovecraft, nobody pretends the gods are nice. And wherever you end up, there is guaranteed to be tentacles.
