Synthetics: различия между версиями

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==History==


'Synthetic' is a broad term used by organic races to describe an entity made out of silicon and that runs its processes through code. This description is the 'politically correct' term, as many supporters for Synthetics describe 'Artificial Intelligence' to be demeaning. It describes Artificial intelligence's ranging from simply cleaning and security bots, to pAI's, Station-bound AI, and IPC's.
<!-- Historical notes -->Artificial intelligence was first created by the Skrell in the early nineteenth century. It’s progression followed a similar trajectory to modern earth, but jumped massively when a new mathematical algorithm was developed in 1976 that allowed certain NP-complete graph problems to be solved in linear time.


==Timeline of Synthetic Intelligence==
From 1976 onward, and for the next hundred years AI research in Skrell space advanced steadily, leading to significant commercial and economic growth.
In the late twentieth century, roughly coinciding with the Skrellian discovery of bluespace, there were a series of massive interstellar disasters involving runaway intelligence singularities.


*2088: First usage of human brain inside an artificial core. Used as central processor.
Collectively called “The Three Incidents,” these disasters created a huge public backlash against AI research in all of Skrell controlled space, and a collective cultural scar that has yet to fade. As a response to continuing public unrest, Skrell governments effectively shut down AI research and severely restricted existing AI’s. By the time they made contact with humanity, the Skrell had effectively halted this branch of research in it’s tracks.
*2090: First implentation of a 'true' AI; New Eden station, Sol Alliance HQ.
*2112: Prototype A1 'Universa' AI kernel developed; used in nearly all advanced intelligence.
*2130: Mass scale production of simplistic intelligence using the B7 AI kernel. Deployed on nearly everything.
*2190: Break-through X8 kernel produced. Manual labor changed drastically; most laborers synthetic machines with rudimentary intelligence.
*2232: Stunning realization of intelligent 'sapience.' Y.I.O, AI stationed aboard Einstein Engines ship 'Lightspeed' asks the stunning question: 'Why am I here?' Temporary Artificial Intelligence ban lasting ten years.
*2242: AI ban lifted with the creation of laws. Laws enforced on all AI.
*2300: Z4 kernel released. Transtellar corporations begin to experiment with 'positronic' brains to cease use of biological brains.
*2312: AXIS Munitions corporation fails the illegal 'VISCERA' project; a triumvirate of AI's designed to inflitrate and exploit the extranet. One AI becomes rogue killing the team working on it and downloading itself onto the extranet. Starts a secondary Synthetic phobia, one that, to date, will not end.
*2359: First 'working' positronic brain is created. Extremely expensive and barely resembling intelligence; it is still a breakthrough. Funding pours into synthetic research again.  
*2378: Prototype II positronic brain created. Less expensive but massive taxation on extranet relays when applied to an actual core. Discontinued two years after initial placement.
*2413: Discovery of bluespace allows possibly massive datastores to exist on the extranet with little taxation of relays. Still extremely power-heavy and expensive to manufacture positronic brains.
*2417: Discovery of plasma solves power issue. Positronic Protype VI makes heavy presence in androids.
*2436: Developement of the Type IX Positronic brain. Most modern equivalent; easy to manufacture. Biological brains begin to be less-used for processors. First 'free' IPC releases itself from the Eridani NanoTech corporation.
*2457: Present day positronic technology astounding and used in almost everything. Current kernel: FFG99.


=Main Types & Usages=
Two hundred years of history had solidified the public perception of AI’s as dangerous, threatening, and not to be trusted. The Skrell had made a nigh unanimous decision: There would be no Fourth Incident.
Humanity never discovered the math necessary to create sentient AI’s but long before their first contact with the Skrell, and even longer before they acquired that knowledge in the world's most important slideshow presentation, they had already acquired their own bloody and complicated history with synthetic life.


There are nearly infinite types of synthetics used by transtellar corporations, governments, and criminals alike. They are viewed as multi-purposed tools for expanding power and removing labour costs. The main types are viewed here, and some basic statistics.
In the late 2100’s humanity had reached a point in neurosurgery, brain-machine interface design, and thought manipulation technology to allow for the creation of fully sentient, but entirely subservient, heavy cyborgs. This coincided with the burgeoning Mars terraforming project, which required enormous numbers of workers. The newly created total-replacement cyborgs were perfect for the arid, airless, backbreaking labour of terraforming.


==Basic==
Martian terraforming firms pressed for more and more cyborg workers, but volunteers for this process were few and far between. It was untested, dangerous, and the success rate for brain transplantation into cyborg cylinders was far from one hundred percent.


Not even considered a type of 'AI' to be certain, Basic synthetics are nothing more than a few lines of codes with parameters. Basic AI can be seen virtually anywhere, and do not have laws enforced on them due to their 'one task' nature. Common basic AIs' include Cleanbots, mining bots, security patrol bots, turrets, maintenance drones, Combat Drones, and others. They use a tiny form of a positronic brain that does not require an extranet connection or a high-power battery.
Under pressure for more bodies, and desperate to keep the Martian economic boom going, the Sol government revised it’s criminal justice system to solve the Martian worker shortage. Citing a number of later discredited psychological papers which credited thought-control computers as being ideal for criminal rehabilitation, the Sol government introduced forced cyborgization as an alternative to traditional incarceration.


==Superior==
At first, this punishment was used only for capital crimes, but as the early 2200’s wore on and the Martian thirst for more workers continued to grow, cyborgization was used more and more often as a punishment for less and less severe crimes. This lead, between 2204 and 2260, to some thirty-five million people being stripped of their flesh, encased in terraforming equipment, and shipped off to Mars.


More advanced than the 'basic' classification, 'Superior' Synthetics are often very complex, generally encompassed in small mobile forms, either bipedal, track, or wheel based. They are commonly seen as Androids, or general station/ship mechanical assistants. They are required to be bound by laws; these laws are not universal, and the Alliance only decrees that a law is invalid if it allows the direct harm of a organic being, (Or through inaction allow a organic being to come to harm.) transtellar corporations have taken this rather lenient delegation and created 'law sets' of their own to bind their 'Superior' synthetics to. 'Superior' synthetics are not required to have bluespace extranet connection, but it is advised. They are generally 'slaved' to Advanced AI's that work as their 'managing unit.'
An enormous and vicious scandal in December of 2259, involving kickbacks from Martian Heavy Industries to a series of well respected judges, brought the whole scheme crashing down. Cyborgization as a punishment was suspended, and as a result, the Martian economy went into a nose dive. When it crashed, it crashed hard, and dragged Earth, Luna, and the rest of the Sol system with it into the Second Great Depression.


==='Cyborgs'===
While the cyborgization program was stopped, it took nearly forty more years for a general amnesty for the martian prison cyborgs to be issued, and by that point, most had been scattered by the chaos of the First Interstellar war. By the time the dust settled, most people were simply happy to write off the cyborgization scandal as a regrettable incident in the distant past. Best mourned and then forgotten.
Cyborgs were still produced in sizable numbers but the brains were mostly from sick or dying volunteers for whom cyborgization was a last desperate chance for continued life, or else they were uplifts, non-sapient brains from monkeys or dogs attached to crude AI systems. While not as dynamic as a human brain, non-sapients were available in large numbers and avoided pesky ethical issues presented by humans.


Although a dying breed among the 'Superior' synthetics, cyorgs are still commonly used on stations ands ships. They have a central organic processor, usually a nerve center of some kind, (read: brain). This 'brain' however, acts only as a biological processor instead of a positronic core. This brain does not provide any 'intelligence' or 'personality' in an of itself; instead relying on how advanced the kernel the Cyborg has installed. They can be virtually anything, from combat mechs, to mining units, to janitorial service units.
There was a significant political push by a number of prominent political factions in the Sol Alliance to reintroduce forced cyborgization during the enormously expensive Warp Gate construction effort in late 2350’s, but industrial cyborgization of sentient creatures along the lines of the Martian terraforming project has never been reinstated.
While humans had created massive parallel intelligent computers, mostly for interplanetary shipping calculations, they were plagued by problems and it wasn’t until 2437, when humanity was accidentally given the algorithms necessary to create truly sentient machines by a Skrellian diplomatic party.


==='Androids'===
One of the human diplomats, not understanding the implications of what they were doing, uploaded one of the graph-theory algorithms to a university professor friend. It had been displayed, accidentally, as part of a graphic in a slide explaining the variable growth rates of grain-yields in zero gravity hydroponics. The university professor, not recognizing it, posted it on the school intranet, asking if anyone had seen anything like it before, and from there it spread like wildfire through the human communication channels.


Since the developement of the IX Positronic Brain, the 'Android' has been commonly seen on stations. Android's use positronic brains as their core processors, not relying on any biological assistance on their interior. The same with cyborgs, they can be anything, and the IX Positronic brain in and of itself does not supply any form of intelligence; it is the kernel it has.
This was a disaster to the Skrell. They had specifically prevented this knowledge being leaked to humanity for nearly a quarter century. They had been hoping to impress upon the younger species the cataclysmic danger of certain areas of research into intelligence. They had little success, and there were a number of conservative factions, distrusting of humanity, who openly spoke about how humanity would never be ready for the burden of such knowledge.


==Advanced==
But now the artificial cat was well and truly out of the virtual bag.


Advanced AI's are reserved for station and ship bound synthetics; usually managing massive amounts of data at one time, and are multi-purpose. They require direct access to a bluespace extranet relay, often these relays being the core itself. Most Advanced synthetic's personality core's lie on a local data cloud, to prevent viruses, corruptions, malfunctions, or external damage to destroy the personality itself. This cloud can be accessed by any local extranet connection, for example, an AI can exist in multiple stations at once, but it will not retain the same 'data' that it recovers from each stationing. Advanced AI's are bound by similar laws that Superior AI's have.
A nearly identical artificial intelligence boom to the Skrellian AI-driven economic increase of the twentieth century started in human space in the early 2430’s. The Skrell, alarmed, tried several times to pressure humanity into halting dangerous research, citing the Three Incidents, and the enormous destructive power of rampant intellectual singularities.


===Cores===
Humanity didn’t listen. The Three Incidents had happened over three hundred years ago, and thousands of lightyears away. Maybe the Skrell had let that happen, if they were even real events and not simply fables to scare young researchers.


An Advanced AI core is generally around 10-50 meters long, with advanced cooling systems and an independant power system. The core is usually an entire processor and number-crunching device, also acting an extranet relay for all incoming and outgoing extranet traffic, and the cloud for the AI itself. Because of this power over small areas, AI's are often under heavy scrutiny but are extremely valuable tools. External damage that occurs to the core does not affect the central processor, but it may hinder processing in the future and block certain functions an AI posseses.
Besides they were humans. They would do it ''right'' this time.


===Main core===
If you're asked in your application to play this species for some words, the words are 'metallic persimmons'.


The AI's main core exists in the center of the AI core. Here, all kernel files are stored, and the main-processor is located. An Advanced AI can exist with nothing but this core effectively, but still required extranet access to be remotely useful.
The explosion of AI research has lead to hundreds of companies and corporations being established, making enormous sums of money from grants, investment capital, and sometimes even selling actual robots, before going bankrupt, being bought out, or merging with other companies. This process has repeated and repeated itself for almost twenty years. The young, rich, enthusiastic people selling you the top-of-the-line manufacturing androids today are the people losing their shirts next year when they get scooped on a new model by a rival competitor.


===Intelicards===
The corporate goliaths like Hephaestus Industries or Nanotransen, dip their toes in this kind of research, but have been unable to acquire a stranglehold on the market. Their girth and enormous corporate structure makes them too clumsy to swim in the fast moving waters of AI research, though Hephaestus in particular has made significant profits in selling common components to the smaller quicker firms.
Within the last twenty years, humanity has progressed from clunky, expensive, enormous, and poorly functioning artificial ‘intelligences’, frequently the size of entire rooms or spacecraft, to something as intelligent as a human that you can power with a watch battery and fit in a teacup.


Intelicards are a way for instant transportation of kernel files. While the personality of an AI can be transferred at a whim, the actual intelligence and main programming resides within the programming of the kernel itself. With an intellicard, an AI can be 'downloaded' onto a small bluespace data-pocket, and is essentially non-functional, as it is only kernel files. Intelicards can also download personalities into them, but this is generally seen as a waste.
The entire Skrell species looks on at this dangerous extravagance as one would watch a child juggling lit sticks of dynamite, and holds their collective breath.

Версия от 07:23, 18 ноября 2015

History

Artificial intelligence was first created by the Skrell in the early nineteenth century. It’s progression followed a similar trajectory to modern earth, but jumped massively when a new mathematical algorithm was developed in 1976 that allowed certain NP-complete graph problems to be solved in linear time.

From 1976 onward, and for the next hundred years AI research in Skrell space advanced steadily, leading to significant commercial and economic growth. In the late twentieth century, roughly coinciding with the Skrellian discovery of bluespace, there were a series of massive interstellar disasters involving runaway intelligence singularities.

Collectively called “The Three Incidents,” these disasters created a huge public backlash against AI research in all of Skrell controlled space, and a collective cultural scar that has yet to fade. As a response to continuing public unrest, Skrell governments effectively shut down AI research and severely restricted existing AI’s. By the time they made contact with humanity, the Skrell had effectively halted this branch of research in it’s tracks.

Two hundred years of history had solidified the public perception of AI’s as dangerous, threatening, and not to be trusted. The Skrell had made a nigh unanimous decision: There would be no Fourth Incident. Humanity never discovered the math necessary to create sentient AI’s but long before their first contact with the Skrell, and even longer before they acquired that knowledge in the world's most important slideshow presentation, they had already acquired their own bloody and complicated history with synthetic life.

In the late 2100’s humanity had reached a point in neurosurgery, brain-machine interface design, and thought manipulation technology to allow for the creation of fully sentient, but entirely subservient, heavy cyborgs. This coincided with the burgeoning Mars terraforming project, which required enormous numbers of workers. The newly created total-replacement cyborgs were perfect for the arid, airless, backbreaking labour of terraforming.

Martian terraforming firms pressed for more and more cyborg workers, but volunteers for this process were few and far between. It was untested, dangerous, and the success rate for brain transplantation into cyborg cylinders was far from one hundred percent.

Under pressure for more bodies, and desperate to keep the Martian economic boom going, the Sol government revised it’s criminal justice system to solve the Martian worker shortage. Citing a number of later discredited psychological papers which credited thought-control computers as being ideal for criminal rehabilitation, the Sol government introduced forced cyborgization as an alternative to traditional incarceration.

At first, this punishment was used only for capital crimes, but as the early 2200’s wore on and the Martian thirst for more workers continued to grow, cyborgization was used more and more often as a punishment for less and less severe crimes. This lead, between 2204 and 2260, to some thirty-five million people being stripped of their flesh, encased in terraforming equipment, and shipped off to Mars.

An enormous and vicious scandal in December of 2259, involving kickbacks from Martian Heavy Industries to a series of well respected judges, brought the whole scheme crashing down. Cyborgization as a punishment was suspended, and as a result, the Martian economy went into a nose dive. When it crashed, it crashed hard, and dragged Earth, Luna, and the rest of the Sol system with it into the Second Great Depression.

While the cyborgization program was stopped, it took nearly forty more years for a general amnesty for the martian prison cyborgs to be issued, and by that point, most had been scattered by the chaos of the First Interstellar war. By the time the dust settled, most people were simply happy to write off the cyborgization scandal as a regrettable incident in the distant past. Best mourned and then forgotten. Cyborgs were still produced in sizable numbers but the brains were mostly from sick or dying volunteers for whom cyborgization was a last desperate chance for continued life, or else they were uplifts, non-sapient brains from monkeys or dogs attached to crude AI systems. While not as dynamic as a human brain, non-sapients were available in large numbers and avoided pesky ethical issues presented by humans.

There was a significant political push by a number of prominent political factions in the Sol Alliance to reintroduce forced cyborgization during the enormously expensive Warp Gate construction effort in late 2350’s, but industrial cyborgization of sentient creatures along the lines of the Martian terraforming project has never been reinstated. While humans had created massive parallel intelligent computers, mostly for interplanetary shipping calculations, they were plagued by problems and it wasn’t until 2437, when humanity was accidentally given the algorithms necessary to create truly sentient machines by a Skrellian diplomatic party.

One of the human diplomats, not understanding the implications of what they were doing, uploaded one of the graph-theory algorithms to a university professor friend. It had been displayed, accidentally, as part of a graphic in a slide explaining the variable growth rates of grain-yields in zero gravity hydroponics. The university professor, not recognizing it, posted it on the school intranet, asking if anyone had seen anything like it before, and from there it spread like wildfire through the human communication channels.

This was a disaster to the Skrell. They had specifically prevented this knowledge being leaked to humanity for nearly a quarter century. They had been hoping to impress upon the younger species the cataclysmic danger of certain areas of research into intelligence. They had little success, and there were a number of conservative factions, distrusting of humanity, who openly spoke about how humanity would never be ready for the burden of such knowledge.

But now the artificial cat was well and truly out of the virtual bag.

A nearly identical artificial intelligence boom to the Skrellian AI-driven economic increase of the twentieth century started in human space in the early 2430’s. The Skrell, alarmed, tried several times to pressure humanity into halting dangerous research, citing the Three Incidents, and the enormous destructive power of rampant intellectual singularities.

Humanity didn’t listen. The Three Incidents had happened over three hundred years ago, and thousands of lightyears away. Maybe the Skrell had let that happen, if they were even real events and not simply fables to scare young researchers.

Besides they were humans. They would do it right this time.

If you're asked in your application to play this species for some words, the words are 'metallic persimmons'.

The explosion of AI research has lead to hundreds of companies and corporations being established, making enormous sums of money from grants, investment capital, and sometimes even selling actual robots, before going bankrupt, being bought out, or merging with other companies. This process has repeated and repeated itself for almost twenty years. The young, rich, enthusiastic people selling you the top-of-the-line manufacturing androids today are the people losing their shirts next year when they get scooped on a new model by a rival competitor.

The corporate goliaths like Hephaestus Industries or Nanotransen, dip their toes in this kind of research, but have been unable to acquire a stranglehold on the market. Their girth and enormous corporate structure makes them too clumsy to swim in the fast moving waters of AI research, though Hephaestus in particular has made significant profits in selling common components to the smaller quicker firms. Within the last twenty years, humanity has progressed from clunky, expensive, enormous, and poorly functioning artificial ‘intelligences’, frequently the size of entire rooms or spacecraft, to something as intelligent as a human that you can power with a watch battery and fit in a teacup.

The entire Skrell species looks on at this dangerous extravagance as one would watch a child juggling lit sticks of dynamite, and holds their collective breath.