The Practice War [Complete]
- Thread starter Snowfire
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Snowfire
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Except for, you know, the enormous social differences that would never condone the use of child soldiers
More on this topic later, I need to consult with my technical team.
Nah, they wouldn't be soldiers; they'd be doing the Rosie the Welder jobs while the adults were off soldiering. I'm kinda-joking about the "14-year old military vet" idea; that just doesn't make sense even with skill chips and the like. What I was getting at is that the academic part of schooling is probably now something being handled by skill chipping and sleep learning; children still need socialization and basic biological development that'll keep them out of areas of responsibility and danger for some time.Except for, you know, the enormous social differences that would never condone the use of child soldiers
More on this topic later, I need to consult with my technical team.
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- Somewhere.
Yeah. Something something what happened to CRISPR, etc.
Baughn
Healing-type writer
- Location
- Dublin
It all got tarred with the same brush. In principle non-secret based research shouldn't be covered by that injunction, but in practice nobody wants to risk it. Funny, since we're doing similar things using the sixth secret, but even PW humanity isn't perfectly rational.
On the bright side, in a very few years it'll no longer matter.
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- Germany
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That is in no way ambiguous phrasing.
And getting a mind-machine interface working without bio(neuro)logical research -
- Location
- Ekaterinburg, Russia
Hmmm. Okay, this is convincing enough. I won't argue the point of working on Skin of Steel.
On a different note:
I notice that only uju32 himself, and two others, have given their voices to a specific answer. The one in bright green.
So, since I am no longer contesting a plan of action, I'd like to see a few more [Answer] votes given by players. And to codify a few extra options.
[X] [Answer] Can we please hear some amusing tales about Amanda's Artifacts, their quirks, and events surrounding them?
[] [Answer] Can we please hear some amusing tales about Amanda's singing career and events surrounding it?
[] [Answer] In what state did Art of Humanity meet the Week of Sorrows, and how did it change since then and up till now?
@Snowfire, please add these three [Answer] options to the list.
Also, note that the two "Can we please hear" Answers aren't limited to Amanda's POV. It may equally be a colleague, a friend, or a member of the family that regales us with them.
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Snowfire
Polyglot of Chimera
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Added the first two. I'm not actually sure what the third one is meant to be asking, so I'd prefer some clarity before adding it.
And more people voting on an Answer would be really nice, if people are still interested in those.
[X][Plan]Imminence
[X] [Answer] Can we please hear some amusing tales about Amanda's Artifacts, their quirks, and events surrounding them?
[X] [Answer] Can we please hear some amusing tales about Amanda's Artifacts, their quirks, and events surrounding them?
Snowfire
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Um...no, not really. There are a few things to unpack here, but I'll start with the cultural one, as I feel this needs to be made clear.
Children are children. They are not going to be involved in humanity's war machine, no matter what part, and the duty of care of those in the world who are adults is in part one to ensure that kids are able to be what they are. At least for a while. That means they get to grow up without needing to worry about what might be coming, because their parents and more will protect them. That is the point of being a parent, at the absolute simplest level; protect the offspring.
Moving on, there are quite a few issues with skill chips as they stand, and that's in this world before taking into account how PW's reality has souls and the effect that has on trying to, well, input information like that. On the simplest level, I think this is a difference in how we see brains, in that in most people don't actually learn or understand skills in the same way as anyone else. Transfer of skills like this is something that would require reverse-engineering the skill, then reverse-engineering the target mind so that the transfer agent could effectively input the skill being transferred. That...isn't something that PW science is really capable of at this point.
Now, they can supply support via brain-computer links. Building a VI with a skill and giving people access to that is going to be a very valuable learning tool. But things like what you're implying? Skill chipping and sleep learning? Not really likely to be effective. Putting it simply, PW humanity doesn't have the level of posthuman technology to make that jump.
However, this is only the first major issue here. The larger one is that of the soul, which according to what PW humanity has been able to uncover appears to be a distinct construct from the brain itself. Giving the mind access to another point of data input, as is done with brain-computer links, that's doable. But implanting information in the manner of accelerated learning? Much, much more complicated. That's going to require the ability to undertake what's effectively detailed brain surgery, but on the soul, and humanity simply doesn't have sufficient understanding of how it (the soul) works to do that. You've built Unison Platforms, yes, but they cheat. They tap into the power of a Potential to really work, in many ways. Normal humans don't have that.
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So, brain surgery doesn't happen?
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
More likely, when it does happen, the soul tends to be somewhat disrupted by the experience and has an extended recovery time. A form of convalescence that we just didn't know about until we started being vaguely able to come up with a scientific answer to "so, how's your soul doing" in the past 2-3 decades.
Snowfire
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No, it happens. It even works. The brain in PW is generally identical to what it is irl, there are just a few key differences in the purpose it serves. As a piece of hardware, though, it matters. A lot.
- Location
- Germany
- Pronouns
- He/Him
What then is the difference between surgery, injury, learning and skill uploading? And is it different to before Practice?
- Location
- Ekaterinburg, Russia
Well probably not the right wording then. Art is an extremely broad subject here - theater performances, opera and ballet, concerts; painting and sculpture, even architecture; fashions and more... The question is about what the world was like, not technologically, but aesthetically.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Well, learning is gradual, which probably matters.
Surgery and injury are both known to be traumatic, especially when they involve the brain. Soul-trauma being involved along with body-trauma doesn't really change much.
Skill uploading is more like traumatic surgery or injury and less like gradual learning.
Children don't ever get to exist in a separate reality bubble from the world around them; in fact trying is usually a bad thing, as people who grow up too sheltered find themselves unable to cope with the world as it exists when they finally do need to grow up. It's not like the youth of Humanity 2.0 are going to be left completely in the dark about the Shiplord threat: even if they are completely shut off from media and contained in their own segregated information bubbles, which is itself somewhat dubiously ethical, if nothing else they'll see their parents' stress levels rising and then become frustrated when they are forbidden from doing anything to help and are instead told to go and play, because that's what children should do.
It doesn't help that the cultural background of Humanity 2.0 works against you here as well. In fact we're playing as perhaps the poster child for teenage activism, Amanda Hawk, whose work as a child to create the Circles has not only become part of the cultural zeitgeist, but has no doubt entered the lexicon of human mythology and probably grown in the telling, especially among LiFE members. In today's world children are expected to be second-class citizens, completely incapable of making decisions on their own for themselves; in PW's world we have the current generation in charge of the world being keenly aware of what children are capable of.
Now, again, I'm not saying that PW Humanity would ever put children on or even anywhere near the front lines of combat; in fact I rather expect, like London during the Blitz, that children will be sent away from the Orbitals and maybe even from Mars for the next four to five years. At the same time, however, I also expect that PW Humanity will have long since recognized that it's unreasonable to force children to care about studying pure academics for years with no expectation of any aspect of their education having any practical use. It was a very fashionable idea in the 20th century that you could completely divorce academic learning from practical experience, but one of the many things modern educators are learning about childhood education is that children are more engaged when they can see that the academic work they are doing has actual, practical applications
You see this in already-existing omakes, too. Nei and the band Aya referenced are both doing what in today's world would be normally kept out of the hands of children (well I guess you have teenage boy bands, but it's not typical). Aya's hometown is majority-children and has a significantly large district designed and built by children. PW humanity, in other words, gives children far more ability to access resources than modern-day humanity; it should come as no surprise that a significant fraction of kids will use those resources for things that have practical value to humanity as a whole. And we can be assured that the children won't be exploited by this, for the same reason we can have a super-communist government run at least in part by unelected oligarchs and be assured that there isn't even a hint of corruption: because humanity Practiced itself to be more empathetic.
While I get what you are saying I think you are mixing things up a bit, whether or not a society wants children to have practical experience is not the same thing as having children working to provide for the economy in a meaningful way. Actual work comes with a pressure to perform that simply is not there when dealing with even the most hands on of studies. I think it is that pressure that @Snowfire is talking about being kept from children.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
I think what we're likely to see here is that children, by virtue of being given control of more resources*, are more plugged into the world economy, such as it is after multiple rounds of post-scarcity technological revolutions.
What that likely doesn't translate into is children specifically managing key war-effort tasks, most of which involve things like "oversee operations of planetary nanoforge" and "optimally place defense platforms" and "make sure there are no significant faults anywhere in the hundreds and hundreds of kilometers of cable runs aboard this battleship." They're simply not tasks that can reliably be entrusted to children given children's state of development.
On the other hand, it just might involve "let Junior figure out where the furniture is supposed to go in the new house, we can always have the robots rearrange it if he makes a mistake anyway and frankly I don't need the stress." Which very indirectly contributes to the war economy, in the same sense that children performing farm chores contributed to the war economy of a medieval society.
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*(albeit with adult oversight and probably VI oversight even when the adults aren't around)
What that likely doesn't translate into is children specifically managing key war-effort tasks, most of which involve things like "oversee operations of planetary nanoforge" and "optimally place defense platforms" and "make sure there are no significant faults anywhere in the hundreds and hundreds of kilometers of cable runs aboard this battleship." They're simply not tasks that can reliably be entrusted to children given children's state of development.
On the other hand, it just might involve "let Junior figure out where the furniture is supposed to go in the new house, we can always have the robots rearrange it if he makes a mistake anyway and frankly I don't need the stress." Which very indirectly contributes to the war economy, in the same sense that children performing farm chores contributed to the war economy of a medieval society.
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*(albeit with adult oversight and probably VI oversight even when the adults aren't around)
Adding to the above with regards to Amanda, she is an outlier, in many ways the outlier to end all outliers so her working does not really say that much about the vast majority of children, but it does indicate that there are probably cases of children being judged mature and responsible enough to do work, those children who would actually be more stressed at the thought of not contributing to the economy than they would be by the strain of work, they are just not statistically relevant. Or at least that is how I see it. Does that make sense @Snowfire?
Snowfire
Polyglot of Chimera
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