I'm only halfway through the podcast, but I'm already really jazzed.

FYI, my last name is Carryer. I live in New Zealand, just down the road from Malcolm.

Joshua, were you thinking of Donna Haraway?  That radical gender stuff is super interesting to me.  I'm very excited about a game about that.

Maybe you cover this later on, but one of the things I'm worried about is the potential for the game to spiral off into kind of abstract conceptual struff, rather than concrete actions and consequences.

Shock: I think has the potential to go that way, if the players aren't careful.  You end up with conflicts like "Do the Space Mutants get free of the Space Nazis?" or whatever, where it's interesting, but it's all kind of abstract and at a remove. 

I think an important part of reinforcing the concept of humanity and bodies and change is to anchor the mechanics really strongly in physical actions and responses.  Kind of like how IAWA only resolves physical conflicts.

Maybe that's not your thing though?

I have a lot of things to say about personhood and how we percieve people as individuals, but it may have to wait.

For my homework:

I think a transhumanist game should be about exploring the edges of what we consider a human being.  How far can you go from a human body, a single consciousness, human concerns and emotions, a gender, a sex, and all that stuff, and still be considered a human being?

So, I keep bringing up H+ as a name. I remembered why I'm so keen on it: h+ magazine. They've got an article on the HAL exoskeleton from the header on this episode and another about Eclipse Phase.

It's also quite attractive. Check it!

Post edited 8:09 am – September 3, 2009 by Nathan Wilson

Hey guys,

I just want to say that I’ve been following the podcasts and I’m stoked you’re doing some ‘serious’ SF Nar design.

I was going to say, but Simon beat me to it, that the theorist you’re looking for is Haraway. She’s pretty rad and part of a slightly larger movement of post-structural feminists who routinely frame and abuse their ethics around liminal metaphors, such as the cyborg. Monsters, Goddesses and Cyborgs: Feminist Confrontations with Science, Medicine and Cyberspace (Lykke & Braidotti) is a pretty good introduction to that particular camp. Not that you guys have time to read.

I’d like to interject and say that the idea of the Singularity is particularly Christian, if not Greek. Modern discourses are always already prefiguring the subject as human, masculine and rational. None of us occupy this first (arche) position any longer; we are not a thatness but thisness. So, the positions of resistance and crossing over must be found in other (anarchic) figurations.  It is “an inhumanity immediately experienced in the body as such” (Deleuze and Guattari). I’ll try not to frame this in ideological-dialectical jargony terms. It’s not so much that we are alienated from any particular essence, (like you guys mention in your critique of cyberpunk, dualism and EP) but it’s that we construct ourselves in paradoxical terms; there is always uneasiness between the real or ontic and the virtual or ontological. This is too general. What I mean to say is that we have no teleos or eschaton; there will be no rupture/rapture/singularity. This requires a confession of who we are that is implicit with being guilty of something rather than a simple honesty about being. Moreover, the notion of the possibility of a singularity is a return to the idea that the knowability of the ontic is guaranteed by God.

So, for myself, transhumanism isn’t interesting because of its nerd-rapture but rather in the absence of both a utopian revolution and/or rapture that we are left with a fundamental ambiguity about ourselves. The lack of this in H_­­+ fiction and theory is troubling for me because it’s a return to some sort fascistic theocracy by way of technology.That often being the case, again not that you have time to read but I'd strongly recommend The Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia by Samuel R. Delany.

Truly, I’d be interested in a game without God but with people instead. For myself, the premise that it would address would be what ‘people’ or ‘person’ meant. By leading with the fiction, the players would answer that question for themselves, maybe differently each time.

(xposted on Story Games)

Science Fiction treats religion like all other fairy tales. It exists in the minds of the characters but is otherwise meaningless to the body of fiction. While the singularity is treated as “nerd rapture” that is only a slightly better insult to futurists than “you suck.” (actually that's not fair, it's kinda funny)

I am trying to remember my Miss Manners here, so first I want to say the podcast is a great idea so far. It is a genuinely unique and useful undertaking. And it meets a good idea with a good implementation.

I do have to get a few issues off my chest about transhumanisim (and SF in general). Most so called “transhumanists” books are not written by scientists, or worse they are written by scientists, or even worse they are written by computer scientists. What I am saying is take these books with a huge grain of salt. Huge grains. Most writers are just that, writers. So while they are fun to read, they have no idea if their real content is any good. And that means usually it is not.

Most of the best non-fiction books are not written by writers. The best history books are written by historians, science books by scientists, math books by mathematicians. See the trend? Scientists are actually even worse in this case. Technological advancement is an engineering/manufacturing problem. Something scientists understand as little as anyone else, but they think they know it. Computer science guys are even worse, they think they know it and they assume computing principals apply. (in engineering it is impossible to train programmers to engineer, you always have to teach engineers to program.) Place as much faith in these books as wired or popular science.

Everyone knows about Moores law (Or more precisely Moores Good Guess). There are a few problems with some singularity ideas, like replicating human brains. Brains are more complex than neural connections. And beings are the sum of their parts, not just brains.

I have a computer with a trillion processors, can it think? Not without the correct software/firmware/hardware and interfaces. Can AI's exist? Yes. Will they magically exist when that moores law says so? No.

Here is something else, nano technology. It is always cheaper to make things on a large scale. Bigger is more efficient, by the cube of the distance. And that increases as you get to molecular sizes. Nano technology will never build everything, it is too inefficient. And many so called nano scale projects are actually huge. Like space elevators. Nanotechnology is a tool not panacea.

Now that my rant is over, lets move to the good stuff.

Let me add a concept. Manufacturing equipment speeds up, shrinks, makes better products at a linear rate. Reducing cost and cycle time. What if a new product can be made in a day, in a room; rather than a year in a factory? Something we discovered in antenna design is that now it is faster to build a new design than to simulate it. What if the singularity concept is in fabrication?

Another? Currently the cycle from scientific discovery to implementation is 20 years. If that were shortened, that could be another singularity aspect. Or, if medical technology bumps up a little more and people start doing more bio-engineering increased biological advancement would be another possible singularity.

You guys, and by you guys I mean Rob, seem to hate dualisim. So why not include anti-dualistic elements? Body feeds back to brain and all.

Also, the singularity might not be the only big bad. Why not consider other possibilities? It could be some kind of catastrophe in the making. Nuclear war, asteroid strike, solar prominence or flare, alien invasion, robot takeover, super disease, bio threat like parasites (vaylen, aliens), gray goo, infopacalypse, economic melt down, ideological war etc.

For issues my favorite is morphological freedom (and Extropianism). If I want squid tentacles and robot brains, who are you to tell me no?

I also like exotic environments like deep space cyborgs or bio engineered Europan squid people. And what about AI's can I play Pinocchio?

It might be useful to figure out a type of story that you want to tell. Political, exploratory, murder mystery? That was a little all over the place. Hopefully it made some sense.

“The nanotech thing you're talking about is, I think, a non-sequitur. It may be less energy-efficient to build lots of tiny building machines, but it gives you the capability to build larger machines when they're required and it reduces the amount of skill and consciousness required to make a thing. By making matter programmable, you make objects general purpose the way a computer makes logic general purpose. “

The difference in energy is roughly comparable with driving a car across town and placing it in orbit. Computer logic is not really general purpose anyway. Particularly with systems like GPU's or other specialty hardware. Besides computer logic meets far fewer design goals than matter must.

“There was a series of experiments from 10 years ago or so that used genetic algorithms to redesign microprocessors on an alterable chip. The chip (in a robot, if I recall), was then tested in the real world along all other configurations — the fitness function was real world gnarl.”

It was PLD's. A famous event because it was the first practical non virtual experiment of the sort. It has affected some more recent work on micro robot designs.