What occurred to me immediately, is that I'm at least as interested in how we are impacted as human beings by the technology we create as I am in just the mere capabilities of it as so often originally conceived. See, inventors mostly create new tech to solve a problem that they see. Often this has to do with a production or efficiency issue. However, what gets interesting (all too often in a distopian way) is how the tech gets used to manipulate and overcome other people in one fashion or another that has nothing to do with or the opposite intention of the original purpose. Facebook, the thing that was allegedly made to bring friends together, has also created new ways to anonymously gang up on and virtually assault people, sometimes to the point of their choice to suicide. It is also one of the largest data mining operations on the planet, and has been discovered manipulating data streams to bias political news to favor one side over the other based on whether the stories showed the party in a favorable or unfavorable light. Also, studies have shown that the highest users of Facebook have shown an overall decrease in happiness using it over time.
Not quite the invention it promised to be.
So the BBC story I was reading, also about Facebook, described the phenomenon in which as many as 30 million users who were now deceased, but still had active accounts, and sometimes, active data streams with continually updating content. The person was still "virtually alive" according to Facebook. One presumes that the content on the page over time continues to feed the profile picture of this person which generates the advertisements they get and the real junk mail and free promotional bait they get mailed to them.
The machine continues to seek for the ghost in the machine.
So what if your sci-fi Jovian moon colony, having to be self-sufficient for years at a time, and with asynchronous communication, has the latest communication and network tech. Say they have a real "network of things" in which virtually every machine of any kind from comm tech to basic construction tools on inventory all are chipped and part of the net. Suppose everybody is connected continuously to their version of Google Glass as a way of keeping records, gathering efficiency data, and providing a safety net. The Glass is likely to be a cyber implant somehow (possibly reversible possibly not) and is part of the network overseen by the Siri or Echo like AI that continues to keep the data and, like Siri or Echo, provide an internet voice to the database. The colony is sustainable enough that it is actually providing an economic return (be it ever so modest) to Homeworld, and thus has it's own modest economy. With 3D printing and aggressive, largely automated recycling factories on the moon, and the annual drone container ships bringing in new goods, there is a modest local version of Amazon mashed up with Makerbot catalogs. Because Siri tracks your social media data stream, it creates a virtual you, and a virtual profile of what you consume, so it auto orders and auto prints or delivers what it decides you want on a routine basis. Based on your profile, Siri auto-replies for you to those in your circles so you don't have to be interrupted in your personalized version of the latest Hollywood blockbuster (only a month old) which stars the CG star of your choice. "You" can like back effortlessly. Work at the colony goes on, happy, comfortable, productive...
Until the plague.
A mutated super virus that wipes everyone out in short order. As people die, their virtual profile continues to "live on", moderated and updated by Siri, continuing to have virtual dialogues with other profile users. As more die, fewer live posts feed the data stream, and their content skews the profiling algorithms, which eventually skews everyone's data stream living or dead, and thus their profile over time to some degree. But the auto conversation between virtual users continues. Siri does not care about contact... only input and ouput and data.
The moon colony continues to hum for years, though at a reduced rate, and the responses generated and resource shipments back to Homeworld become increasingly odd... repetative, sometimes non-sequitur, and in a schizophrenic fugue. When an investigating team eventually arrives over a decade later, what they find is a ghost planet, populated by the technologic undead specters of the past.
* * *
I continued to chew on this idea and had a thought experiment for a little sort-of world building game.
How does future tech versions of some modern or near future tech in the shadow of human vice change society?
So the players each take turns picking an item of future tech and these are listed down the right. Then everyone discusses each node with a cardinal sin, and they determine what society does with this.
For instance, custom organ printing. In the shadow of Envy, we might ask, first, is the printer a Sharper Image printer? Or a WalMart printer? Top dollar tissue or does it require a one year contract of anti-rejection drugs? This could be like the I-phone vs. free offer phone choice, with status being afforded to those who can pay.
Gluttony as discussed in classics does not exclusively refer to eating too much, but to consuming in excess. In the shadow of Gluttony, an organ upgrade addict is the pathological step beyond the piercing or plastic surgery addict. Or you could just go there, and call Gluttony an excessive desire to eat...
Greed easily dovetails with both the above if you are the salesman chasing the next commission selling the custom organ printers by preying on all the vices, vanities, fears and self-loathing that consume the buyers.
Lust, Pride, Sloth, and Wrath can undoubtedly be found overshadowing their own organ printers. In a world taken one step further from our reality TV, convenience consumer culture, "re-skinning" takes on a much more disturbing meaning if you can print the bone, cartilage, and skin to look like the latest Kardashian...
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