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> Wireless society entertainment, anyone really bothered by the posible consequences?
Snow_Fox
post Sep 19 2009, 01:00 PM
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OK I'm one of the voices, howling in the wilderness, against 4th ed but I have said that I liked the decking stuff.

I was ,finally, reading through unwired and was really worried by the hwole entertainment thing. People can live virtual lives, even a wired family all sitting around in a living room all watching differnet forms of entertainment completely oblivious to their fellows around them. In theory many office workers living in the protections of an archology could 'log on' to work while on their way. So how long until the corpers start to atrophy? I know the corps would love this-no need to go out, stay home and use corp approved entertainment, why go lcubbing in the meat body when you can do it in cyber and appear without the beer gut or in tres chic clothes you don't have to worry about staining/malfunctioning? Kid's no good at sports in the gym, well he doesn't need to wrok out harderrt, he just goes virtual and plays great.

The idea of the educated part of meta humanity becoming more and more ...flabby while the SINlesshave to be physical? Anyone else ever read The Time Machine?
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hobgoblin
post Sep 19 2009, 01:42 PM
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meh, with implant muscles, you dont need to exercise to stay fit.

i would hazard that bone lacing, muscle replacement/augmentation and similar tech would be comparable to liposuction and similar today...

and have it not always been this way?
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Evilref
post Sep 19 2009, 02:33 PM
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This can happen now, try this for a not-unrealistic example

08:30 Get up, shower, coffee, breakfast
09:00 Go to computer in home office, login to work, go through emails, actioning replies and work as normal.
12:00 Microwave lunch, watch TV for 20 minutes
12:30 Back to work
17:00 Decide to put in a few hours of work overtime, still all at home.
18:50 Log off work, go microwave dinner
19:30 log in to WoW, open up social network sites
00:00 Finish raiding in wow, end conversations with friends, go to bed

It's entirely possible for someone to have a near-total online social and work life today. I've met couples who spend more time talking to one another (during the week) on ventrilo/teamspeak while playing an MMO than they do face to face. I don't think it's terribly healthy but it's happening.
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ShaunClinton
post Sep 19 2009, 02:40 PM
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I kinda doubt it is a concern. I'm sure all those arcologies have gyms.
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eidolon
post Sep 19 2009, 03:10 PM
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Wow, been a rash of posts lately that just make me want to reply with one sentence:

It's a dystopia.


So if you're perturbed by the implications, that's a good thing. It might have lost more and more of it every time it gets a new edition, but Shadowrun is not supposed to be a fairyland of rainbow colored unicorns. It's supposed to point out the negative in what is, what could be, etc. It's supposed to emphasize things that make you uncomfortable.

And yeah, there are some folks out there that are looking forward to exactly what you describe. And as Evilref illustrated, it's not that uncommon today, what you're describing. Not every part of a dystopic viewpoint is going to be negative to everyone, but by damn, something in there should be, or they've lost half of the point in writing the game world.
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CanadianWolverin...
post Sep 19 2009, 05:22 PM
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Huh, and here I thought the wireless implications would be an improvement over decking when it comes to being physically mobile. Heck, in fact, why wouldn't this make it so that the cubicle goes bye bye and in stead the wage slaves now do their work from the corp approved commlinks and AR programs while either doing laps together and sitting on a bench when they need to? Think of the costs the corp would save, improved health would limit the drain on their health benefits, not having to pay for desks/cubicle walls/terminals - heck, why even outfit a room at all other than the wireless stuff? I hope you are following me on how this might improve a corps bottom line by lowering costs by going wireless and AR. VR would probably still require a certain level of sit down enviroment though, but how often does the average corp person actually need to go VR unless its their area of technical expertise? And even then, unless security required it, why not off load that cost to the wage slave, have them just VR from home in their bed, couch or recliner?

I hope I am not too far off in thinking this, my understanding of SR4A AR/VR is very limited in experience.
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Synner667
post Oct 6 2009, 10:18 PM
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50 years from now, in an age where machine intelligences are viable there won't be any jobs for wageslaves.

A single machine is more efficient and much cheaper than 50 staff.

Anyone trying to justify wageslaves is just trying to maintain 20th century officelife.
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hobgoblin
post Oct 6 2009, 10:42 PM
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and that could make things very interesting, depending on what way the economy ends up swinging...

btw, i swear i read a novel of some kind online about such a scenario, but i cant find it...
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Apathy
post Oct 6 2009, 10:59 PM
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QUOTE (Synner667 @ Oct 6 2009, 05:18 PM) *
50 years from now, in an age where machine intelligences are viable there won't be any jobs for wageslaves.

A single machine is more efficient and much cheaper than 50 staff.

Anyone trying to justify wageslaves is just trying to maintain 20th century officelife.

But machine intelligences are harder to manipulate and control than real-life meat wageslaves. You can't effectively beat the AI if it tells you to go fuck off. It doesn't really need anything you've got, and once it goes sentient it has its own priorities that might not coincide with yours.
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Synner667
post Oct 6 2009, 11:05 PM
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QUOTE (Apathy @ Oct 6 2009, 11:59 PM) *
But machine intelligences are harder to manipulate and control than real-life meat wageslaves. You can't effectively beat the AI if it tells you to go fuck off. It doesn't really need anything you've got.

I though the whole point of having wageslaves was to have office jobs done cheaply.
Obviously your definition of office job is very different.
Hiring a room full of people, just so you can shout at them and abuse them, and you're thinking that's an office, says something about the offices you've worked in.
Most office work does not take much in the way of brainpower to accomplish, so easily achievable with even moderately powerful fuzzylogic smart machines.

Tom Peters [business guru, among other things] thinks that most office jobs will be replaced by software within 10 years.
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hobgoblin
post Oct 6 2009, 11:07 PM
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question is, will the cost of getting and maintaining the hardware and software be lower then just hiring some people at minimum wage?
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AndyZ
post Oct 7 2009, 12:17 AM
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When the corps run everything, there is no minimum wage. If one machine can do the work of 50 people, but each person works for less than 1/50th of the machine's cost, then people working is what you have.
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hobgoblin
post Oct 7 2009, 01:57 AM
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minimum wage being the resources need to keep them living and doing the job they are needed for, not the current concept of law mandated minimum...

sorry that i was unclear, i sometimes jump a couple of steps in the thought chain...
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Warlordtheft
post Oct 7 2009, 02:26 AM
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QUOTE (hobgoblin @ Oct 6 2009, 08:57 PM) *
minimum wage being the resources need to keep them living and doing the job they are needed for, not the current concept of law mandated minimum...

sorry that i was unclear, i sometimes jump a couple of steps in the thought chain...



Answer: Not all things at present can be handled by a compuuter. Now throw in the expert systems and AI's and any machinist/mechanic/technical job is at risk. However, an AI will have trouble relating to Flesh people and while it can handle the report creation, it will not have the depth of understanding to deal with human emotion. From this perspective, wage slaves will be needed to present the report and deal with the client.
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hobgoblin
post Oct 7 2009, 02:39 AM
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heh, the AI sounds like your stereotypical IT department (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)
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fistandantilus4....
post Oct 7 2009, 04:54 AM
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"I take the specs, and give them to the programmers!"

"Well let me ask you this; why can't the clients, give the specs directly to the programmers?"

"Because programmers aren't good with people! I have people skills! Don't you see"

I love that movie.

Remember that in SR, programs are getting better and better at interacting with a person emotionally. If you don't believe it from the Virtual Companions, think about emoti-toys. They may well be able to be better at reading people than people are. Of course, "little" incidents like the Renraku Arcology will probably scale back whole sale replacing of meat workers with programs for a while with SR.

But there's certainly no reason that the corp can't down size a families living spaces within the arcology to 1/3 the size, the issue them a subscription service to virtual housing enviroments and entertainments (automatically debited from their salary of course). Make simple soy crap food reminiscent of The Matrix taste like New York Strip Steak with the right program added (again, for only a small fee), and you cut down considerably on the "human cost".

[ Spoiler ]
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Heath Robinson
post Oct 7 2009, 04:55 AM
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QUOTE (Snow_Fox @ Sep 19 2009, 02:00 PM) *
OK I'm one of the voices, howling in the wilderness, against 4th ed but I have said that I liked the decking stuff.

I was ,finally, reading through unwired and was really worried by the hwole entertainment thing. People can live virtual lives, even a wired family all sitting around in a living room all watching differnet forms of entertainment completely oblivious to their fellows around them. In theory many office workers living in the protections of an archology could 'log on' to work while on their way. So how long until the corpers start to atrophy? I know the corps would love this-no need to go out, stay home and use corp approved entertainment, why go lcubbing in the meat body when you can do it in cyber and appear without the beer gut or in tres chic clothes you don't have to worry about staining/malfunctioning? Kid's no good at sports in the gym, well he doesn't need to wrok out harderrt, he just goes virtual and plays great.

I'm not entirely sure how this is unique to SR4. We've had cube farms for decades. We've had mainstream desktop computers nearly as long. Television has been around longer than even that. Telephones, have been common for nearly a century.

Sedantarism has been an official problem for the past decade.
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Semerkhet
post Oct 7 2009, 03:25 PM
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QUOTE (Snow_Fox @ Sep 19 2009, 08:00 AM) *
OK I'm one of the voices, howling in the wilderness, against 4th ed but I have said that I liked the decking stuff.

I was ,finally, reading through unwired and was really worried by the hwole entertainment thing. People can live virtual lives, even a wired family all sitting around in a living room all watching differnet forms of entertainment completely oblivious to their fellows around them. In theory many office workers living in the protections of an archology could 'log on' to work while on their way. So how long until the corpers start to atrophy? I know the corps would love this-no need to go out, stay home and use corp approved entertainment, why go lcubbing in the meat body when you can do it in cyber and appear without the beer gut or in tres chic clothes you don't have to worry about staining/malfunctioning? Kid's no good at sports in the gym, well he doesn't need to wrok out harderrt, he just goes virtual and plays great.

The idea of the educated part of meta humanity becoming more and more ...flabby while the SINlesshave to be physical? Anyone else ever read The Time Machine?


I've seen families at restaurants where the children were playing handheld games or listening to music, the adults reading newspapers or playing with their smartphones, all totally ignoring each other. If they do that in a restaurant, think what the home life must be like. Our real world society is already at the place you claim to fear and you're worried that a group of game developers are taking a *fictional* dystopia in that direction? /boggle

Things are getting weird when people are dissing 4th edition because it makes use of the implications of a wireless society we pretty much already have right now.

p.s. There's a treatment under development that turns off the protein responsible for muscle atrophy. If a drug like that is under development in 2009, no one and I mean *no one* of Middle Lifestyle or higher in the Shadowrun world of 2072 is fat or weak unless they want to be. Many of the technological aspects of the SR setting are more like 2030 than 2070, but I forgive them because they have a game to balance and they're also not prescient.
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CanadianWolverin...
post Oct 7 2009, 04:02 PM
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QUOTE (Semerkhet @ Oct 7 2009, 08:25 AM) *
I've seen families at restaurants where the children were playing handheld games or listening to music, the adults reading newspapers or playing with their smartphones, all totally ignoring each other. If they do that in a restaurant, think what the home life must be like. Our real world society is already at the place you claim to fear and you're worried that a group of game developers are taking a *fictional* dystopia in that direction? /boggle

Things are getting weird when people are dissing 4th edition because it makes use of the implications of a wireless society we pretty much already have right now.

p.s. There's a treatment under development that turns off the protein responsible for muscle atrophy. If a drug like that is under development in 2009, no one and I mean *no one* of Middle Lifestyle or higher in the Shadowrun world of 2072 is fat or weak unless they want to be. Many of the technological aspects of the SR setting are more like 2030 than 2070, but I forgive them because they have a game to balance and they're also not prescient.


I also see it like SR 2070 has had all these set backs to their tech thanks to having to dedicate resources to dealing with disaster after disaster on like a Katrina scale. Who knows how many scientist, technicians, inventors, etc have been smoldering in their graves thanks to violence, magic, disease, or malnutrition who would have been the ones giving up the goods. I mean, how many technological marvels come out of the dystopian hot spots of our current world, other than new cheap and devious ways to kill each other?

And in some ways, I have noticed the opposite with regards to the teched out family, thanks to things like being a facebook friend with your mom, they are more likely to know what is going on in their kid's lives than ever before without even having to sneak into their bedroom, strip search it, and read their diary. It is easier than ever to track (and who knows, even actually be involved with) your children in cyberspace and meatspace.
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Apathy
post Oct 7 2009, 04:08 PM
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QUOTE (Synner667 @ Oct 6 2009, 07:05 PM) *
I though the whole point of having wageslaves was to have office jobs done cheaply.
Obviously your definition of office job is very different.
Hiring a room full of people, just so you can shout at them and abuse them, and you're thinking that's an office, says something about the offices you've worked in.
Most office work does not take much in the way of brainpower to accomplish, so easily achievable with even moderately powerful fuzzylogic smart machines.

Tom Peters [business guru, among other things] thinks that most office jobs will be replaced by software within 10 years.

This doesn't have anything to do with my personal work environment, but with the fluff. The dystopian theme of SR seems to push the idea that life is cheap and people are downtrodden. There is no minimum wage. No unions. No worker's rights. The Corps don't believe in a healthy work-life balance. They can demand a 100-hour a week schedule and get it while only paying the wage slaves a subsistence stipend in their Corp script which the employees are forced to spend in the company store. [Non-managerial] Employees who get too old and feeble to stay productive often 'volunteer' for special programs [lab rats] or are moved to retirement homes which are even more austere [though their families may continue to get fake letters from the company talking about how happy they are].

Employees generally don't resist because they've been indoctrinated from birth, because they're convinced that exile to the Barrens equals death for both them and their families, and because any attempts to cause trouble result in them mysteriously disappearing. Access to the real world outside of company housing is restricted to management. An AI generally won't have these controls on its behavior. It's got no family to hold hostage. The company can't be sure of the AI's loyalty or continued work ethic. Attempts to program loyalty or obedience into the AI aren't always successful and sometimes cause them to go insane (hello Deus!).

I absolutely agree that there are some jobs that unintelligent algorythms would handle more effectively than people. But the more intelligent they make the AI the less control they'll have over it, and the Corps are all about control.

[edit] Not all people would be in this situation. Only the Megacorps have the resources to create a self-contained SCIRE or Arcology. But the people inside that world don't know what the alternatives are.
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Semerkhet
post Oct 7 2009, 04:13 PM
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QUOTE (CanadianWolverine @ Oct 7 2009, 11:02 AM) *
I also see it like SR 2070 has had all these set backs to their tech thanks to having to dedicate resources to dealing with disaster after disaster on like a Katrina scale. Who knows how many scientist, technicians, inventors, etc have been smoldering in their graves thanks to violence, magic, disease, or malnutrition who would have been the ones giving up the goods. I mean, how many technological marvels come out of the dystopian hot spots of our current world, other than new cheap and devious ways to kill each other?

And in some ways, I have noticed the opposite with regards to the teched out family, thanks to things like being a facebook friend with your mom, they are more likely to know what is going on in their kid's lives than ever before without even having to sneak into their bedroom, strip search it, and read their diary. It is easier than ever to track (and who knows, even actually be involved with) your children in cyberspace and meatspace.

We're going to get down to quibbling pretty quickly on this topic but I'll just say that many of the technological developments of the last half-century or so are the work of a tiny proportion of the general population of the so-called advanced industrial societies. My viewpoint on the subject is that the many catastrophes of the SR timeline make it very hard for governments to provide a safety net for all their citizens, which is exemplified by the large numbers of SINless and generally high poverty rates in the SR setting. On the other hand, if the world economy does not tank completely, which by the SR fluff it hasn't despite all the disasters, corporate R&D is going to chug away. I know this is a generalization, but I think that while the impacts of the SR timeline are certainly felt, it wouldn't slow the pace of technological advancement as much as you seem to think it would. All very much IMO, obviously.
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BookWyrm
post Oct 7 2009, 05:24 PM
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Wouldn't most corporations in 2050-2070+, having liberally borrowed the idea from Japanese corps, instituted a physical exercise program for their employees? I fugured this was a given in most Corporate structures by then.
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Semerkhet
post Oct 7 2009, 05:31 PM
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QUOTE (BookWyrm @ Oct 7 2009, 12:24 PM) *
Wouldn't most corporations in 2050-2070+, having liberally borrowed the idea from Japanese corps, instituted a physical exercise program for their employees? I fugured this was a given in most Corporate structures by then.

No, they just make the acceptance of certain "medi-chines" injected into your bloodstream mandatory in the employment contract. These medi-chines keep you fit and productive, eliminating the need for wasteful exercise periods.

Okay, I know that's a little further out than the canon SR tech level, but they'd do it, wouldn't they?
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hobgoblin
post Oct 7 2009, 05:39 PM
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think of it as cattle, and one gets all kinds of ideas...
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hobgoblin
post Oct 7 2009, 05:39 PM
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