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Message: <blockquote data-quote="reason" data-source="post: 494810" data-attributes="member: 6022">worry about the singularityThe singularity should be happening sometime between now and then. Some good resources on what we'll be doing:1) <a href="http://www.aleph.se/Trans" target="_blank">http://www.aleph.se/Trans</a>2) All of SJ Games Transhuman Space lineBut basically, the theme is that people underestimate what huge processing power can do for you. Gartner tells us that desktop machines in 2011 will contain 10-15 40GHz processors. And that's just 2011. By 2030 we'll have AI by brute-force molecular-level simulation of human brains if we haven't figured out a better way before then.But basically as soon as you have self-improving AI (i.e. AI that can rewrite its own code), you really can't predict what's going to happen next. You may get something that looks like Greg Egan's Diaspora. OTOH, you may get something that looks like my Artilect Earth setting where the superbeings go off and do their own thing, managing not to step on the posthumans left behind. Or you get something that looks like Vernor Vinge's Marooned in Realtime -- where no-one gets left behind and the human race sublimes into the compusphere.Or, or, or -- million options.But anyway, you get the point. If you're running a human-comprehensible game set in 2075, it's probably a "left-behind" thing. Super-AI happened, molecular nanotech happened, but the PC cultures don't or refuse to access such things, and are not overly influenced by whatever superintelligences and great powers do exist. Humans are still around.Modesitt's Gravity Dreams has an example of a nanotech civilization enclosing pre-nanotech civilizations, and a superbeing doing the same to the nanotech civilization.Reason</blockquote>

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