The 20' By 20' Room

Future Not Quite Perfect

Posted by Neel Krishnaswami on April 14, 2006 at 11:53 PM

Ages ago, on a thread on rpg.net, I mentioned that I wanted to run a science fiction game, based on the idea that since 2005 is better to live in than 1905 is better to live in than 1805, it would be cool to have a future that's as much better to live in than the present than the present is better than the distant past (at least for a First Worlder).

This post elaborates on that idea, based on a scheme that occurred to me while reading Alexandre Dumas's The Three Musketeers. The trouble with the setting in a lot SF rpgs is that it's political history -- wars and battles and large-scale social and economic trends -- when what you need to actually play a character is really a kind of social history -- what the culture is like at the level of individual interaction.

Now, The Three Musketeers is written with a strange mix of idealism and cyncism. The musketeers are a byword for romance and chivalry, but almost all of the action in the novel can be understood in terms of the characters seeking sex, money, status or violence in the basest, most elemental ways. It's the interplay of High Romance and primal self-interst that makes the novel compelling.

How to apply this to science fiction? Well, the idea is that the stuff we need to know to effectively make characters and conflicts are the basic ingredients of money, status, biological urges, and violence, and that the march of science has fundamentally changed all of them.

So what are the science-fictional technologies we can throw in? Let's say that we've got advanced robotics and cybernetics; genetic engineering and neuroscience; ubiquitous, networked, and powerful computation; and cheap and easy space travel. Basically, the tech is just the off-the-shelf cyberpunk and space opera toolkits, with the added assumption that it's all cheap and widely-available.

1.1 Money

The big difference between now and the future is that the future is a lot, lot richer. Let's call the unit of currency the star, and say that the purchasing power of one star is about the same as one dollar today. The idea is to make it easy for the GM and players to come up with plausible prices for things -- just use modern prices.

However, the median income is around a thousand times higher than today, give or take a factor of a few hundred -- let's say that the typical person has a real income of around 50 million stars per annum.

The technological gimmicks underlying this are personal fabrication, advanced personal-scale biotech, non-magic nanotech, and so on.

1.2 Status

Okay, to make this interesting let's rule out a) projecting modern status structures unchanged into the future, and b) not do a thinly veiled historical ripoff and stick 18th century French aristocrats in space.

In the modern day, the sorts of jobs that people associate with "prestige" are things like law, architecture, science, and medicine. These are all fields in which the practitioners possess relatively rare and specialized skills by virtue of mastering a large and fairly slowly-growing body of knowledge. Thus, demand is high relative to supply, and professionals have high prestige.

So our change is that all of these low-prestige skills in the future. Thanks to improvements in psychology, cognitive science, drugs, the net, cybernetics, and all that, most people can do engineering or law as easily as modern-day people can do arithmetic. There's no prestige in science or law because everyone can do it -- there's no scarcity at all.

1.3 Biology

The big change is that the people of the future understand it. Aging has been cured; no one dies of old age. How the brain gives rise to personality is understood; people can take drugs or therapies to substantially alter their personalities however they like. The far-future equivalent of open-source hackers work together to design entire custom ecologies.

1.4 Violence

A couple of changes here. The basic idea is that in the future, violence doesn't work as well as a tool for coercion as it does now.

First, death can be cured. Most people keep backups (slang: life insurance). Killing someone to silence them doesn't reliably work. Sometimes you can't even use violence to cause someone pain, if they can turn off their pain receptors.

Second, between the net and ubiquitous miniaturized robotic cameras, a pretty comprehensive system of sousveillance exists: almost every public (and most private) spaces are watched and the logs exist for public examination online. This makes getting away with socially-unsanctioned violence very difficult. (I'm riffing a bit on David Brin's Transparent Society here.)

2.1 Jobs (Money + Status)

First: tedious, mind-numbing work doesn't exist any more. Basically, if a task is boring, then it can and has been been automated so a person doesn't have to do it. Nobody has a job as a burger-flipper or a garbage man, because robots do that. Nobody works as an accountant or a business workflow document consultant, either, because computers do that.

Second: because durable specialist knowledge has been universalized, nobody works as specifically an engineer or programmer or lawyer or doctor. All that stuff is casual knowledge that anyone can do as needed, like people today can read or do arithmetic.

So what's left? The basic idea is that what you can't download off the Net is 1) ephemeral specialist knowledge, like knowing what is fashionable within a particular subculture at this particular cultural moment; and 2) embedded social relationships, like being a specific member of a particular group of people.

A side-consequence of all this is that giant corporations don't exist in the future. Almost all of the administrative and manufacturing overhead has been automated away, and as a result most firms function more like bands or design studios -- either you have a small group of closely-interacting people who make everything happen, or like in open-source, you have a large group of loosely interacting people who make things.

If you don't want a job, the future can accomodate that, too. Personal fab labs are a common piece of tech, and anyone can download plans from the Net. If you don't mind driving GNU Flying Car 10.7.12, rather than (say) a Zoroaster Studios Ameratat, you can get by perfectly well. You just won't be one of the cool kids.

Basically, by our standards, social class kind of starts at middle class and goes up. (Way up -- there are individuals who are richer than the entire modern world.)

2.2 The Life Cycle (Biology + Violence)

First, aging and disease basically don't exist, except voluntarily. People can adopt any apparent physical age or sex, and can change their appearance through genetic modifications. These changes usually involve a week or two in a medical center (many people own their own). It's possible to invent new sexes, but this is a minority sport, because it can make it harder to find partners.

Thanks to the march of neuroscience, how the brain works is well understood. There are no mental illnesses, and people can change their attitudes and habits with custom neuromods. Furthermore, people generally encrypt their brains to keep hackers and vandals from taking them over with sleazy mind-control spam. In fact, it's a crime not to encrypt your mind, in the same way that violating public health ordinances are in the modern day.

If you die, you can be brought back using cloning and having your brain re-imaged onto the new body. People call this life insurance. There's no law against making multiple copies of your personality, but each copy is legally a distinct person that has equal rights to your property, so most people live serially. People typically only make copies of themselves to solve very serious personal problems like love triangles.

New people are either born and raised from childhood, or grown as adults and imprinted with an adult background knowledge, or at any point in-between. Most people have a childhood (people who want families want kids), though usually they start at toddler-hood, skipping the entirely nonverbal stage of infancy.

2.3 Crime (Money + Violence)

Since one of the two guiding tenets of the setting is that Things Are Better, the overall threat of crime is greatly reduced. This shows up in a couple of ways.

First, organized crime is much less influential. This is for three reasons. First, bad ideas like criminalizing drugs, gambling and prostitution have been forgotten, which means that a lot of the money supply for organized crime has vanished. Secondly, ubiquitous sousveillance means that organized crime can't easily engage in loan sharking or systematic extortion -- you can't send someone to break someone's kneecaps when your thug will get ID'd basically instantly. Pervasive cameras dumping video onto the Net also means that unorganized street crime is much less prevalent, and that people get away with crimes of passion much more rarely. And finally, as mentioned under Violence, the threat of violence is just a lot less useful.

However, the other setting tenet is that This Is Not Utopia. Obviously, pervasive surveillance means that there's much less privacy. And that means that busybodies can observe what people do and screech about it on the Net to shame people who violate whatever norms their particular subculture has.

Secondly, even though physical space lacks privacy, the Net offers perfect privacy, thanks to ubiquitous encryption. And the Net also has the power to connect people who would otherwise be too rare to form communities in real space -- such as, say, rapists, slavers, and other lunatics. And they can share information on how to avoid getting caught.

2.4 Politics (Status + Violence)

There's a lot of cultural variation between worlds -- think of the differences between San Francisco, Tokyo, London, and Taiwan -- but in most places you've got an open society or liberal order of some sort. Many, but not all, places are democracies of various sorts, but there are also places that do things like place government in the hands of AIs programmed to respect civil liberties and popular sentiment, and weirder things. Regardless, citizens expect due process as a matter of course, and the Net, sousveillance, and sunshine laws usually combine to produce an administration that's a lot more transparent than our own.

Criminals face, as usual, imprisonment and fines. Also, for serious offenses they can choose to accept personality alterations to cure their antisocial tendencies. This last option is only used for serious felonies, and is voluntary.

There are totalitarian states, but they're always marginal affairs on the fringes of galactic politics. The march of technology has made it possible to build dictatorships that maintain total control down to the citizens' thoughts, but any states that go that far inevitably lacks the flexibility to cope with outside shocks and unexpected new developments. Things can get very messy when they collapse -- getting people who have never even known the concept of individuality to become free citizens is, er, hard.

2.4 Popular culture (Money + Biology) and High culture (Status + Biology)

The big idea is that digital everything means that a system of copyright is untenable, and as a result there is no such thing as a media industry anymore. All culture comes either as free culture, or as advertising. Free culture people probably understand -- artists doing their thing for their own reason, commissioned by wealthy patrons, and so on. Additionally, advertising became a "respectable" culture industry because it that benefits from people spreading it far and wide, and artists looking to work in expensive media can get commercial sponsorship if they integrate their work with the commercial message.