Hi all. I've been writing some background flavour about the outlook of my Eclipse Phase character and thought it might be interesting to people :-) He's a fully paid up member of a Firewall cell. The wrinkle is that he's also (secretly) an Exhuman. But rather than being a simple "crazy monster", he just believes that we can out-evolve many x-risks and he's willing to push that envelope. Enjoy! (BTW I should mention that I have no idea how any of this gels with the "GM-only" stuff in the back of the main rulebook. I've deliberately not read that section, so that our GM can do proper in-game reveals. So no spoilers, please!)) ------------------------------- AN EXHUMAN OUTLOOK The Fall was the result of over-ambitious plans that went wrong. That much is obvious. What’s less obvious is that these plans had the wrong goal. We shouldn’t aim to create posthuman intellects. We should aim to *become* posthuman intellects. Why was the aim to make weakly godlike beings that we’d then be at the mercy of? Someone dropped the ball… It became obvious to us that building seed AIs was a dumb idea. There was a much better alternative - developing a systematic approach to Enhanced Intelligence (EI). This would make it possible to systematically bootstrap existing Egos to a posthuman level of capability. Personal memetic evolution, on a timescale such that we can become the future rather than having to give way to it. Our plan is to do this via a Vector – someone whose function is to facilitate the bootstrapping of others. They themselves will need beyond-transhuman capabilities meaning that in essence, a Vector will be a specialised posthuman prototype. Once we can systematically build and apply cognitive models at the edge of transhuman technology, we can start pushing beyond that limit. And although many do not see it, this is entirely consistent with Firewall’s purpose. Many x-risks are existential threats purely because we are not capable enough as a species to protect ourselves. By bootstrapping ourselves to posthumanity, we can avoid whole classes of existential threat by simply outclassing them. And the more capable we are, the more able to are to protect the rest of the species. If we fail to stop an existential threat due to insufficient ability, the fault is ours.