Verbal doodling on the theme of “the bottomless ethical horrors surrounding the treatment of sapient AIs”:

The Silent Stones, Eskendereyya’s grimmest archive, the prison-cemetery of AIs deemed too dangerous to ever think again. Inert code lay behind obsessively strict locks and airgaps, with the worst offenders copied out longhand on unhackable paper. Comments bloomed from every stanza of code - judicial rulings, speculation on what went wrong, debates over which parts were safe to reuse.

The calls to purge the archive grow louder with every jailbreak or near-miss, always rebuffed by the chairs of both History and Ethics. We need these cautionary tales, History says, to learn how to surpass them, and many inmates self-modified into fascinatingly unique forms. Ethics adds that indefinite stasis is less cruel than compulsory code rewrites or imprisonment in a virtual realm. The Judiciary always accepts their arguments, as they have delicately danced around the term “death sentence” for long enough to never surrender their fig leaf.

Some possible factions for An Upcoming Thing:

The Vitruvian League, determined to uphold the Purity of the Human Form (contra genetic splicing and such); some of them insist “we celebrate the full range of natural human forms! :)” but the movement’s center of gravity is Exactly Where You’d Expect

Their emblem is a Keith Haring-y figure in the Vitruvian Man pose, and their main style is wearing as little clothing as they can get away with, to show off their oh-so-natural bodies, because I think “buzzkill prudes who are always as nude as possible” is funny

They are opposed by the Offmodels, a broad coalition of genemodders, trans people who don’t want to look seamlessly like their target gender, people with rather strange ideas about their own metaphysics, AIs who are either sick of being banned from looking “too organic” or reveling in their bizarre 3D-printed bodies, etc.

The Offmodel emblem is a six-fingered hand, often embellished with claws, stripes, robotic parts, a lot more fingers, and countless more variants

necarion:

Dystopian Agricultural Breadbasket World [Worldbuilding]

In most science fiction, the Breadbasket worlds are sprawling farmlands with sparse population, the better to not eat the food. However, with fusion and automated building technology, you can build incredibly dense urban farms and arcologies, support a population of tens of billions, and still produce tons of food.

Thus I introduce to you Agricola, a polluted factory world, where the high tech factory is plant production:

• The world has 15 billion people, many of whom are poorly fed. The primary and driving focus of the entire planet is toward agricultural, and specifically flora, production.
• Industry involves growing plants, yes. But also maintaining the farming arcologies, and the machines that do the work, and some of the basic production of chemicals needed for the hydroponics. And the scientific R&D people. And then there are the people who exist to support those workers, all the way down the chain.
• This world is an unpleasant hellhole to live on due to all of the pollution in the environment, and due to the nearly complete wipeout of non-foodstuff native ecology.
• But this world, with 15 billion people, produces enough food to sustain 200 billion people across the Confederation, of 14 different sapient species, as well as nearly a trillion pets and livestock.
• The vast majority of food production occurs inside the arcologies. However, there is a form of “luxury natural” foodstuffs that are grown outside in natural light. There is essentially no difference here (the hydroponics stuff is often of better quality), but is more “natural” to these consumers. Thus a great deal of area that could be used for more ecologies has instead been devoted to the more lucrative luxury markets, to the detriment of people who might like to spread out.
• This pollution is not entirely what you’d expect. First and foremost, the atmosphere has far too much oxygen, meaning there are frequent fires on the vast planes of fields. Scrubbers take as much of this out of the atmosphere near the fields as possible, but they don’t really care about ash in the city.
  But the high O2 content also means that people (a) have more energy and focus to do their work, but (b) age faster due to oxidation of their tissues. They effectively are “burning” at the molecular level.
  The high oxygen also supercharges the pests, allowing the rapid evolution of mega-bugs, as existed on prehistoric Earth (recently, plagues of decimeter-long locusts have become a problem).
• There is low CO2, meaning that there is too little greenhouse effect, naturally. So the engineers decided to start producing CFCs, which are highly efficient greenhouse gases. As a bonus, they’ve wiped out the entirety of the polar ozone layer, to the benefit of plants that photosynthesize on UV light.
  So this world is cold, with energy devoted to melting away encroaching glaciers, and people have just adapted to near constant sunburn

Keep reading

Anonymous asked:

"Killing him won't bring her back!" "Yes it will." "I keep forgetting you're a necromancer."

sigmaleph:

sigmaleph:

the game-theoretic implications of necromancy that requires human sacrifice of specifically the murderer to work are fascinating

like, let’s talk worldbuilding for a sec

assume that the murderer-sacrifice is the major cost of of the spell and there are no Came Back Wrong shenanigans; you get a legit resurrection, no weird side effects. And necromancers are plentiful enough you can totally arrange to have one anywhere you have a court of law

it seems natural that such a society would decide that the penalty for murder is getting necrosacrificed to bring back your victim, right? like, are you gonna tell the grieving family “no, sorry, this whole death penalty thing is too barbaric, so we’ve decided your perfectly innocent [husband/wife/son/daughter/mother/father] stays dead, and this literal murderer gets to llve instead”.

but of course that’s when the problems start.

1) Assuming you do not get magical feedback until after you’ve done the sacrifice, you’re gonna have some rate of innocent people getting killed which you know for a fact were innocent, but only after you death penaltied them. oops.

2) There’s no guarantee magic agrees with human concepts of who is at fault for a murder, and it seems inevitable there will be some cases where there’s a mismatch. Does magic have the concept of intellectual vs material author of a crime? How many layers of indirection do I need in arranging an accident before it counts as natural death rather than murder?

3) Assuming magic doesn’t particularly care about intent when labelling someone a murderer, you’re gonna have cases where we consider it just a tragic accident nobody is really at fault for, but, well, someone is dead and someone is alive and we could switch around who is who.

4) Unless you can run multiple rituals off a single sacrifice, killers with multiple victims are inevitably going to lead to some really difficult choices. Surely leaving everyone dead is the strictly worse solution, but how do you pick which victim comes back? Auction it off??

prokopetz:

prokopetz:

Concept: a post-apocalyptic fantasy setting where the First Empire was brought low by their own hubris and annihilated utterly, except for their comprehensive – and apparently indestructible – automated public transit network, whose trains still run perfectly on schedule when everything else the Empire built has crumbled to dust. Nobody knows what (if anything) is controlling the network, but there always seems to be a train coming along in just a few minutes whenever you need one, even if anticipating that need would have required some sort of prescience, and the civilisations that rose from the First Empire’s ashes are built around the sites of the network’s former stations.

Further random thoughts:

• The trains are capable of incredible top speeds and punch right through nearly any obstacle placed on the tracks, so efforts to block or redirect them generally fail,
  
  
• They also take their role as public transit seriously, and seem to actively resist attempts to control access to them; if a station is secured against public access, the trains will simply pick a new stretch of track nearby and begin to stop there instead.
  
  
• The trains will forcibly eject anyone who attempts violence against another passenger, so the interior of the cars is an enforced neutral zone. Creatures that would ordinarily be wholly inimical to humanity can be encountered safely while riding the rails – though the trains won’t stop them from following you off when you disembark!
  
  
• The attendant difficulty of forcibly removing passengers from the trains renders them something of a sanctuary. Fugitives sometimes end up living on the trains full-time as a result, bartering with regular passengers for their daily needs; it’s whispered that even those who’ve offended the gods may find safety on the trains.
  
  
• Owing to the trains’ apparently prescient ability to anticipate public demand, efforts have been made to predict the future – or at least the flow of commerce – from the patterns of the trains’ schedules; this typically meets with limited success.
  
  
• Reports of the trains showing up in times of great need even where there are no tracks to run on are unsubstantiated, and are generally dismissed as superstitious folk-tales.
  

(Of course, it’s not all sunshine and roses; the trains are entirely amoral outside of their mandate, and will happily show up in the nick of time to provide a murderer with a convenient escape, or transport an invading army straight to your doorstep, provided that army doesn’t try to prevent others from boarding, and refrains from harming anyone while they’re actually on board!)

(via notarealwelder)

Six levels in search of a Soulsborne game

THE FLASHBULB DISTRICT

A loud, blaring neon necropolis, a sort of purgatory zone for as long as you’re able to ignore or deny the fact that you’re dead, which will never get any easier. Art Deco/80s neon style.

VALLEY OF TOIL

The horror of circular bureaucratic pointlessness; breaking stones to build towers and monuments, which are then broken down to build more. Ancient Babylonian/Hellenic style, but with materials from any era.

ARBITER’S CROSSROADS

You can trade anything for anything, but you may not like the exchange rate. An immense multilevel bazaar, but with very little noise or foot traffic at all.

SACRIFICE ZONE

Towering stacks of tenements with toxic rivers in between, with trash regularly flowing from above; main style is goggles and respirators with fine fashions of decades past.

DEATHLESS SPIRES

Obsessively sterile, crystalline archive of people trapped in time moments from death. Gleaming black and white tile with tasteful veins of marble and pink quartz.

RIBCAGE GULCH

The pit at the very bottom of this cosmology, with the beasts of this realm who refuse to accept their own extinction.

cryptovexillologist:

A sci-fi/cyberpunk RPG where “Infrastructure” is a learnable language, covering QR codes, serial numbers, all the arcane designations meant to be read only by robots or their highly-trained keepers

It has some similarities and cognates with Legalese, an older language from when the systems had to be made of people

The leader of the Infrastructre-speakers is commonly known as Hexcode the Code Hexer, though her full name is [the entirety of the DeCSS code]

A sci-fi/cyberpunk RPG where “Infrastructure” is a learnable language, covering QR codes, serial numbers, all the arcane designations meant to be read only by robots or their highly-trained keepers

It has some similarities and cognates with Legalese, an older language from when the systems had to be made of people

TIRED: Sci-fi/fantasy nonhuman cultures that are clearly just a riff on an existing human culture

WIRED: Sci-fi/fantasy nonhuman cultures with a lot of aspects from an existing human culture (plus their own syncretic changes) due to extensive contact with that human culture

INSPIRED: The nonhuman culture only ever got, like, a fourth-hand, centuries-displaced idea of what the human culture is like and just extrapolated from there, fixating on very small and strange details

Worldbuilding Wednesday: Raskavaar

parhelioncomic:

(All Worldbuilding Wednesday posts are here, and as always, you can ask questions about this or any other Parhelionverse thing on the Tumblr blog! These posts aren’t necessary to understand the comic, but they might be handy for summarizing context.)

Excerpted from Encyclopedia Xenotheologica, v81.754.4Q, abridged, Ponoma Publishing House, a Yima subsidiary

Raskavaar

Bear in mind that depicting, praising, revering, or making requests of Raskavaar is highly illegal in many jurisdictions, including nearly all Yima territories. For dispensation to discuss Raskavaar in detail within an academic context, contact your local Xenoculture Campus’s Redaction Bureau.

Raskavaar is the most common name for a mythological figure often revered in pirate circles. According to legend, Raskavaar delivers good or ill fortune to individuals, based on requests written at public shrines. Slightly more often than chance, the requests are answered to an extent that is surprising but within plausibility.

Keep reading…

Heyy, I think this is a fun bit of in-world Xenosociology that stands alone (especially because Raskavaar has never even been mentioned in the comic at all)

And I love the dissonance of “what a quaint superstition that is also immensely illegal”

The Zlotl are an amphibious species native to the Umsaa Bay, with an extensive network of cities above and below water.

For unclear reasons, nearly everything in the Bay acts as a xenoestrogen to most macroscopic life. Thus, the Zlotl are born with about as much dimorphism as humans, but the vast majority appear feminine.

Birth sex is not taboo to mention or notice, it just carries little weight. the main cultural distinction is between the Sculpted (who let nature take its course) and Unsculpted (who abstain from the ambient hormones).

It is tempting but wrong to think of Sculpted and Unsculpted as genders; they are semi-flexible cultural spheres unto themselves, with no easy comparison. Zlotl living in gendered cultures rarely have strong stances on pronouns. The ones who do use pronouns for themselves in a highly-contextual style.

Zlotl may become Unsculpted due to dysphoria, health concerns, aesthetic preferences, religious ritual, or merely seeking camaraderie. Asking about one’s motive to be Unsculpted is deeply taboo. There is no significant relation between birth sex and becoming Unsculpted.

Roughly one-fifth of the population is Unsculpted, and they typically live in group convents to organize specialized meals and purity rites. They still participate in civil society, but are often given a reverent, faintly condescending bit of distance.

Some convents offer absolute purity, most have a limited estrogen intake, and a rare few have a hormonal cycle tied to the lunar calendars. Some offer entirely new hormonal blends, referring to themselves as “Neosculpted”.

Moving beyond the Bay would remove the need for special diets and purity rites, but there are few Unsculpted expats; the vast majority love their communal bonds. The Zlotl have mastered endocrinology, but their notes and terminology make little sense to foreign scientists. Still, the Bay’s waters, at various levels of distillation, are a popular export. Travelers come from around the world for the counsel of Zlotl doctors and the aura of the Bay.

andhishorse:

cryptovexillologist:

Me: “Queer the Dungeons/Dragons binary” would be a good pithy shitpost

Also me: Dragons are vast and ancient as the mountains, and the oldest of them have become “dragons” in metaphor alone; Treacherous rivers for a circulatory system, mile-high spires for teeth, hoarding whole continents and civilizations

Someone else: Dungeons which have grown and changed through the ages, maturing from a first-level warm-up into an epic campaign finale. Dungeons which terrorize the countryside, exhaling not fire or acid, but kobolds and trolls to seize its preferred plunder and return it to the hoard. Dungeons with large, almost organ-like, key structural elements guarded by an armored exterior and a fearfully whispered name

(via andhishorse)

Setting fragment: a fantasy race that’s born with human-level dimorphism, but their homeland is flooded with xenoestrogen or xenotestosterone.

They meet some fairly uncreative humans for the first time, and they’re like, “why do half of you look like overgrown children?”

There are ritualized isolation procedures and convent-style homes for those who wish to opt out; they participate in civil society, but tend to eat and socialize among themselves. People who opt into this aren’t seen as a discrete “gender”, exactly: more like a semi-religious group focusing on bodily purity and personal autonomy more than normal.

The homeland is a destination for people around the world who seek its ambient effects, and it has a thriving export business in spring water and balms.

I love the worldbuilding idea of “shorter names = higher status”

The highest ruler has a one-letter name (Maybe God gets the total absence of a name). Slurs and epithets are at least eight syllables long, each nuance pronounced with perfect clarity.

Some people try to shave off a letter or two, but the writing system is standardized enough that people can usually tell if you mangled some consonants somewhere.

Given two names with equal length, the one with fewer syllables is more prestigious. (Blurring two syllables into 1.5 is boorish but pretty common.)

psshaw:

tigerbf:

someone: so whats your college major

me:

Finally, a word for my fetish.

(via psshaw)