Hi,

let's make a thread with stories from real life that points towards the coming of a Shadowrun universe.

For instance:

Drone Equipped With Handgun

Drone equipped with assault rifle

What else is out there - selfdriven cars, cyberware, nanotech etc?

A.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership is basically the Shiawase Decision. If the US enters into it, we're not far from the age of AAA megas.

Wow that's depressing, looks like Im moving to the flux state...

Ukraine. You have massive cybertechnology access to the people, shady private militias and questionable news.

Though strictly speaking in Shadowrun canon it should be a disembodied AI: http://www.iflscience.com/rise-machines-ro...ng-logic-puzzle

Hacking wise: Jeep hacked from 10 miles away. Not just minor things like override stereo controls or windsheild wipers (which they did), but killing the transmission, disabling the breaks, and controlling the wheel (in reverse only at the moment.)

http://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remot...ll-jeep-highway

While being able to control the wheel was cute, the test driver was lucky to be on the hacker's good side because just two more boxes of Matrix damage and they would have bricked that Jeep and set it on fire.

Real Doll with Artificial Intelligence.
Sex-Bots, here we cum!

And in the same vain,the government sells land sacred to natives to mining company
http://reverbpress.com/religion/apache-rel...gop-sells-land/

This really made me facepalm. What is wrong with our world these days when people design what should be an internal combustion engine on wheels with all these extraneous electronics? Why would there ever be a reason to have this stuff be accessible via wireless in the first place?

I already hate power windows, seeing them as overly complex and prone to failure. All that I want in a car these days is minimal electronic systems and as much manual control as possible. I hate it when I push the gas and turn the wheel and everything is a super light touch and you can tell that you're not doing anything mechanical so much as you're just sending commands to a computer that interprets them for you and moves the vehicle parts. They might as well have an X box controller sticking out of the dash instead of a steering wheel. I like a stiff steering wheel and the manly feel of a manual transmission.

If you want to keep a car for a long time, it seems like having everything governed by electronics is kind of an achilles heel. If the electronics get wet and short out, you're screwed. If the electronics burn out, you're screwed. If the software gets corrupt or has a bug, you're screwed. It used to be just one chip to help fuel economy. Then it was more, with anti-skid systems that stop you from fishtailing when you spin the wheels going through deep mud in 2WD mode. And now for no apparent reason it has been taken to a comical extreme. To me, it feels like this is just a way to perpetuate planned obsolescence of an asset that used to be able to run for 50 years if you kept it in good condition. The car is becoming like a damned smartphone.

I cannot believe that people don't express outrage at the comical frills and ask for simple, rugged, and affordable vehicles instead.


EDIT:

So based on further reading, vehicles now create wifi hotspots?

I'm not that old, but I feel like I'm really of the past. It's hard for me to imagine something more asinine than a wifi hotspot in a car. When driving, the most important thing is to pay attention to driving. Wouldn't this just encourage texting etc. while driving?

If you're doing something like natural disaster response, remote scientific research, or off roading in extreme rural environments, wouldn't it make more sense just to take a BGAN if you really need to get into the internet, use one of those standalone Garmin devices that lets you send emails or post to social media, or have a separate radio or sat phone? I mean, you might need to dismount and carry that stuff with you on foot, instead of having it tied to your vehicle and be inoperable if your car battery dies or something like that.

I also feel like the world went crazy when smartphones took off. I used to have a droid phone but have stopped using it because after a couple years I realized it is pointless. For a lesser price, everything can be done better by standalone devices. Now I run with a Blu phone with no data connection which is cheap and practical. But the rest of the world instead doubled down on smartphones (and now tablets which are like laptops that stop just short of letting you do any real work), leaving me scratching my head. Somehow my brain reaches the opposite conclusion of everyone else.

Imagine that. Would it be practical to use the drone to try and flank someone? Probably not, in a typical home defense situation. Still, pretty wild.

The Daily Mail UK article makes me giggle for a few reasons.

1) There have been weaponized drones almost as long as we have had drones. Israel was strapping bombs and guns to store-bought remote controlled model airplanes 40 years ago. Nothing new.

2) The technical skill required to rig a gun to a drone isn't particularly high.

3) They mentioned an "unnamed enthusiast" in the article who attached a "machine gun" to a drone, with a link to the same video in the second example above. The enthusiast is hardly "unnamed", it's Kyle Myers, better known as FPSRussia. Also, the video linked is a fake, created at the time as a cross promotion viral video for Call of Duty. The drone featured is CGI, at least during the flying scenes.

Typical alarmist media claptrap. You'd think they'd have spent at least five minutes researching their crap before putting it online, but I guess that's too much to ask.



-k

No, you wouldn't

Simple: All electronic components inside a car are typically connected to a simple CAN bus. Which means they are all using the same two wires to communicate, individual components are supposed to take note whenever they see a message that interests them and ignore the rest. It's a rugged and functional design that has been battle-tested since 1986, does not require any expensive hardware or software, and can be debugged with an analog oscilloscope -- actually, given that a lot of problems come down to faulty connections, grandpa's coal-heated soldering iron would often do.

What it was not designed with was the idea that one of the components on the bus could be constantly connected to a public data service, let alone a mobile one. In 1986, being able to manipulate a device on the bus or connect a new one meant you had physical access, which was considered enough security.


As far as steering is concerned you are wrong, except for a few special purpose vehicles everything on the road still has around a mechanical steering column. No that there is any technical necessity for it, but customer fear of unreliable electronic systems (see the Germanwings 9525 crash, the fly-by-wire system of the A320 gets mentioned prominently in the place everybody gets their information from, so for several days the media narrative was "those damn computers") has prevented any manufacturer from adopting it.

The "light touch" mentioned is Power Assisted Steering.

Which is largely electric/hydraulic, not electronic. It's been around since before the 1950s.

If you've ever lost power while in motion and had to wrestle the steering wheel to get the car safely to the side of the road, you would immediately appreciate having it. Steering a car without the power assist is a cast iron bitch.




-k

Oh, I've had that happen. Lost the power assist on the brake, too. Good times. Fortunately, my magnificent, masculine, and barbaric thews were sufficient to get the steel beast under control.

Welp, someone wants to build an arcology in the middle of the desert now too.