Phil <flick@populus.net> writes:
> > In my roleplaying scenario there is a situation just like this: a new
> > colony planet, colonized by colonists using advanced automation and
> > AI. There are currently 300 people on the entire planet (and many,
> > many more AIs), with a grandiose capital and several outlying
> > settlements, holiday resorts, monuments and an internet with a huge
> > bandwidth. The AIs simply build more stuff to amuse themselves ("Let's
> > make a Mount Rushmore out of that mountain range! We can put images
> > of all the colonists on the rockfaces... hmm, maybe we could carve in
> > our own source code while we are at it!" "The Mary Infiltration
> > Project could of course work out of New Stockholm, but why not build
> > it a base of its own? I'm itching to try out the Stalinist style on
> > the Northern tundras."). It's rather fun to describe this
> > "Mega-Brasilia" - empty highways, grandiose gardens, a 400 floor
> > skyscraper built like an exponential function with just a single
> > office in use.
>
> Why are there only "300 people"? What is a person in this scenario,
> anyway? Why are there "colonists"? There could just be a probe that
> landed, and constructed people as they were needed for the civilization
> it was building.
Not given the assumptions of the scenario (see http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/Game/BigIdeas), which assume a fairly "low" level of technology at least at the start. But things are definitely moving in a singularity-like direction - building people from scratch is still a bit hard (but look at the description of the planet Ridgewell), but nanotech, AI, bionics and cognitive engineering are changing things fast.
As for why 300 people, the main reason is logistics. The people responsible for the colony were in a big hurry, and while they wanted to put a lot of people there, they just had the time to send some basic technicians and a lot of automation/AI to the planet. The reason for the colony was actually as a kind of hidden base to escape to if a crisis got out of hand (the nanoinfection I mentioned in the "Constitutional effects of nanowarfare" thread).
> I'm not saying this would be a good thing. I'm asking whether there is
> a place for "people" as we know them in this scenario.
Depends on who you ask. Many of the people on the colony are redundant given the level of AI activity, they merely act as token humans (on the colony board of directors there are three humans and eleven AIs). Still, they provide a good sanity check for many of the stranger AIs, who have trouble understanding the physical world and propose lots of things that make sense if you are a cluster of knowledge-agents living in a semantic network, but no sense in the real world.
On other planets, humans and AI are developing in a more or less symbiotic fashion; on one planet people often grow up with an AI mentor and it is becoming quite common to implant the mentor into a bionic interface, and other people try to form human-AI-alien symbiotic group minds. Humans are not obsolete *yet*, but CogniTech Inc, Nextstep Foundation, The Faithful of St. Teilhard and the others are working on the problem.
The fun thing with this scenario is that I can use my players as a kind of parallel AI computer to come up with clever reactions and ideas to the issues I put into it; this way I get ideas usable for more "real" studies.
> Wouldn't people be just another resource to allocate and deallocate,
> like heap space, as they were needed or desired (by what, I'm not
> sure)?
Well, look at the description of the asteroid Mary (a nice little Orwellian state) where people are "stored" cryonically until their continued life becomes affordable. One could imagine an "improvement" of their system with experts being reanimated as needed.
And of course, the economic forces in this world are regarding humans as a (valuable) resource; they are certainly allocated and deallocated by the market.
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