Solar System RPG

[TKalbfus]

George Boyette said,

Oh thier message will spread, to the inhabitat of Earth and other stations. The message: Do what we want or pay with you lives. Look what happened in Madrid 3/11. The bombings caused the weekend's elections to 180 to what polls and pundits were predicting and Spain pulled out.

What the MinTech people want is for them to leave their homes and return to Earth where there will be more MinTech people to threaten them and tell them how to live. I think they'll conclude that it is better to stay in space and perhaps move further out to get away from these crasies.

Remember we are talking about the extremist arm of MinTech, and the majority (ie Vernians) only advocate low tech space habitats.

In 2050, there is only one tech at which to run a space colony, anything lower is prespace technology. The tech level of this setting is more complicated than a single number would indicate. Refer to the Chart on the technology and equipment section on page 194 aand 195 of the T20 book, the tech levels are as follows:

Personal TL 10
Armor TL 13
Heavy TL 12
Computers TL 16
Communications TL 6
Transportation TL 7
Space TL 8
Power TL 8 except for antimatter at TL 17

Building an antimatter reactor is actually easier than building a Fusion reactor. The difficulty is in getting antimatter to react only when you want it to; the difficulty in fusion is getting it to react at all. The history of fusion research has been quite protracted and has been going on ever since the invention of the hydrogen bomb in the 1950s. I'm assuming that after 100 years of research and intermittent effort a working reactor is finally built, but it has to be large to get enough plasma at break even. A good guess at a minimum size is based on the ITER design a donut-shaped reactor 30 meters tall and 30 meters in diameter whose total displacement is 1,500 dtons, any fusion reactor smaller than that is impossible with current technology, but larger than that just use the Traveller rules for such power plants. That's how I would do it anyway. For smaller spaceships you need something like antimatter or atomic fission.

If spacers begin a posse (Coalition of the Willing to use a phrase) then some nations and organisations will protest the spacers as a fight against all MinTech, "patron" nations, and affected races/cultures. In worse case, it could trigger fighting between nations, corporations, and stations, which could be a benefit for the MinTechists.

The space settlers will wonder why some nations are protesting their self defense? Perhaps the protesters are the enemy. Out on the Frontier people often have to take the law into their own hands in their self defense. People don't move into space because they are cowards or wimps. That someone would want to live the simple life would not seem like justification for the mass-murder that was being committed, other motivations would be looked for, perhaps a compeditor is trying to ruin them for instance.

 

[Drakon]

I think I would have to agree with George on this one. I think it is clear that the jihadis are a variant on the MinTech terrorists. You look at what they see as an ideal world and how they want the entire world to be, (rather than just their part of it.) and its a throwback to the 12th century.

But also, there is a point of commonality between PETA and ELF and the jihadis. They don't care if you agree or disagree. They see their fight as so important, (or alternately as people so stupid) that they must be forced to co-operate. That failure to do so will result in their deaths. The particular proposals don't matter so much as the method used. And it should be noted that such terrorism only has the possibility of effectiveness under democratic governments. Democracies vote for their leadership. And so their feelings have to be taken into account by that government.

So what a terrorist is doing, is terrorizing the populace, in order to get it to vote the way things "should" be in their opinion. What that opinion is, does not really matter at this level of analysis.

Funding presents its own problems, especially considering higher tech levels, and what that means as far as personal abilities. What can an individual purchase and do, compared to several years ago. StarShip One is a great example. The first space launches, the equivalent of its first space flight, cost millions of dollars and rubles. Now, it cost 20 million to invent the entire launch system. And once its invented, costs come down.

Essentially what I am saying is the higher the tech level, the costs come down to do more and more things, both terrorist related and not. Which means funding becomes less and less an issue as tech level goes up.

This is the essence of the Fermi Plague. As tech level goes up, ability becomes more and more diffused. And it only takes one idiot with a Doomsday device to screw up things for everyone. The Fermi plague was offered as one possible answer to the Fermi paradox, if there is life out there, why have they not contacted us yet? Maybe beyond a certain tech level, civilizations always get wiped out by some nut case.

You are right that such dangerous militants would be disowned by any related group, if that group is smart. It would be in their best interest to co-operate with authorities who were on the hunt. And being a luddite group, that would put them at a distinct military disadvantage.

 

[Evo Plurion]

Originally posted by Tom Kalbfus:
In 2050, there is only one tech at which to run a space colony, anything lower is prespace technology. The tech level of this setting is more complicated than a single number would indicate.

Very good point. I seem to remember a third party Traveller supplement - LBB era, but there must be others - in which TLs were outlined in greater detail than in the original game.

Because a Solar System setting would necessarily involve a much shorter time-frame and a narrower physical focus than the OTU, it would be foolish not to "zoom in" on TLs as in the example above, to illustrate more specific lines of development in smaller, more discreet stages.

 

[TKalbfus]

I believe in using a Solar System setting not as a prequel to the OTU but as something independent, therefore I see no reason to wait on Artifical Intelligence technologies. I really do think machines as intelligent as people could be less than 50 years away. I would therefore introduce AI robotics in a Solar System RPG. Since were dealing with only the Solar System, there is no need to introduce FTL drives. Grav tech makes no sense either, I generally want accelerations of less than 1-g anyway; it makes the Solar System much bigger and it should take from weeks to months to years to go from one part of the Solar System to another and communication is at the speed of light. There may be a few interstellar missions to other stars, but those are of the sublight variety and are of two types: There is the Generation Ship and the fast ship. A generation ship is when a community wants to leave the Solar System and doesn't care how long it takes to get there, they've stored enough supplies to last the entire journey no matter how many generations it takes. The fast ship is much more expensive, only a Government can afford it and it typically involves producing tons of antimatter or building a giant laser to push a laser sail a significant fraction of the speed of light. The most efficient means is to have a giant laser push a stream of mini light sails, accelerating them quickly toward a starship, the starship then fires another laser that vaporizes each laser sail and turns it into a plasma the plasma interacts with the starship's magnetic field and accelerated the Starship close to the speed of light over a period of several months to a year. A fast ship is much smaller than a generation ship and more expensive to send. A typical colonization mission would be to send a fast ship filled with AI robots to a distant planet, the AI robots then terraform the planet over a period of 10,000 years and eventually the generation ship arrives. Generation ships usually travel at 100 km/sec and take 3,000 years to travel each light year. 1/2 the mass of the generation ship is reaction mass. The power source is either antimatter or fusion, it does not really matter, the rocket nozzels have a limitation on how high a temperature of plasma they can handle, so this is the state of the art in rocketry at this time. Laser sails can do better, but require huge lasers that aren't cheap and the ships the propel are small and can't carry that many passengers or cargo. To move large numbers of people you need generation ships.

 

[Evo Plurion]

Yes - it seems unlikely that we won't have some sort of artificial sentience in the next century or two.

As for space travel - no FTL and no anti-gravity!

Early in the settlement of the System, many spacecraft would use transfer orbits - minimum-energy "Hohmann" transfers included - to get around. At this time, travel from one planet to another would take a very long time. For example, a minimum-energy trip from Earth to Mars would take 259 days. Earth to Ceres, the largest known asteroid, would take 472 days. Earth to Jupiter would take 997 days or 2 years and 9 months!

Later, as space travel technology developed, direct flight would become more commonplace, especially for military and high-priority commercial traffic. This is the type of interplanetary travel featured in Traveller from its earliest incarnation in the LBBs: acceleration to midpoint, retrograde turnaround, then deceration until arrival at destination. On July 11, 2104, a ship running this trajectory at 1g would take 5.681 days to travel from Earth to Mars, 8.323 days from Earth to Jupiter and 12.284 days from Earth to Saturn.

For RPG purposes, I would want interplanetary travel to take longer, and I want relativistic effects to be of lesser concern, so I would limit most direct flights to 0.1g or less. At that acceleration, the trips mentioned above would take 18, 26 and 39 days respectively. At 0.01g they would take 57, 83 and 122 days. 0.1g seems appropriate as general upper limit on travel, while 0.01g might be a good figure for most commercial and high-end civilian traffic. Automated bulk cargo runs and trips to less populated areas of the Belt, for instance, might use something like the 0.01g figure.

I've always preferred science fiction in which travel from one end of the setting to another takes a really long time. I was mortified by Star Trek: First Contact and Alien: Insurrection. In both films, a trip from the edge of human space to Earth took a couple of hours. Egad!

 

[TKalbfus]

The Solar System doesn't end with Pluto. You can add any number of fictional planets beyond Pluto that we haven't discovered yet and on top of that you don't even have to worry about their orbits, they will orbit so slowly that you can just find a place on the map and put them there. Not enough time in the whole campaign will elapse for them to move significantly, its just like placing stars on a subsector map. All these planets will be cold places and their could even be a few additional gas giants as well.

 

[Evo Plurion]

In order to have lots of places to visit, the people of our SS RPG will build hundreds of artificial habitats throughout the System. Many could be quite large, spun for gravity and inhabited by many thousands of people.

 

[TKalbfus]

That's right. The obvious places are Earth-Moon L4 and L5, basically draw equilateral triangles with the Earth and Moon at each corner and the L4 or L5 point is the third corner of the Triangle. Another place would be the Earth-Sun L2 point directly behind the Earth when facing the sun is a place where you could hang a space elevator for transfer orbits to Mars. There is Phobos and Demios from which more space habitats can be built orbiting Mars. There might be a habitat orbiting Venus with a bunch of scientists studying that planet. Of Course Mars would have domed settlements as well as the Moon. The Asteroid belt could have many space settlements as well as the Trojan points of both Jupiter and Saturn. Jupiter and Saturn also have plenty of small satellites and there is Titan where you can have more domed settlements on the Surface. It is even possible to have spinning habs in the rings of Saturn. Uranus and Neptune have their settlements and Pluto and beyond have more habs inhabited by people who prefer isolation. The Atmosphere of Saturn and Venus may also contain floating habitats suspended by giant balloons. In the case of Saturn a balloon filled with hydrogen kept at room temperature and a smaller bubble of breathable air in the center would float in Saturn's colder atmosphere.

 

[Straybow]

Errr, I don't think there can be that much development in 2050, even if you back-date space development to the '70s with a continuing Apollo program, the larger original Shuttle design, etc.

The most you would see are tiny scientific posts here and there, with perhaps a viable Lunar colony or two. Travel time anywhere else is too great to move significant numbers of colonists or supplies.

 

[TKalbfus]

Your forgetting about the AI robotics. Robots with a human level of reasoning, that can produce additional copies of themselves can radically increase the labor force, their impact on the economy is not to be underestimated. It is my undestanding that most of these habitats are built with robotic labor, which to a degree acts as a labor force multiplier. Humans would be involved in the planning and in deciding what is to be built. Very little manual labor is done by humans anymore. Humans would program and instruct the robots and the robots would build the space colonies. Robots would also build the space elevators and the spaceships that take th colonists to the colonies. Robots are slightly dumber than humans, but they are smart enough to do most of the physical labor in space. Robots also don't have as much common sense, the follow instructions and they don't care why or what for. They just do what they are told, even if that includes beating their heads against a wall. Robots have no personality, they have no will, they are simply intelligent machines that follow instructions. I wouldn't be surprized if the economic growth rate for the world was at 100% because to these robots multiplying themselves and doing labor that humans used to do. I believe this is referred to by some science fiction authors as the Singularity, once we have a machine that can do just about whatever a human can and we can make as many as we want, the world changes radically. Getting into space would be alot easier with all of that robot labor, and AI is just a linear progression of current trends that are happening today. No exotic new physics is involve, its just building smaller and faster computer ships, and massively parallel processors that approach the computation rate of the human brain and teaching these computers and software to learn the way a human does. Once an AI learns something it can be copied as many times as desired and you don't have to teach another AI that same thing again, you just use another copy of that first AI which you taught. This is a Solar System RPG, but it is also an "I Robot" type of setting. Robots are inferior to humans in intelligence, but they do alot of the brute work to a much greater extend than they do today.

 

[robject]

Straybow,

The assumption would have to be that some breakthrough in manuever drive tech allows constant acceleration, say at 0.1 G (or even 0.01 G). Otherwise, there's really no use in having any people beyond the Earth and Moon, and probably no economic sense in exploiting whatever mineral resources might be out there.


Tom,

I didn't realize this was an "I, Robot" setting -- I thought it was more closely tied to Traveller: the formation of the Solomani Confederation, First Contact (with the Vilani), and the precursor to the Interstellar Wars. I would be most reluctant to admit AI into an RPG; I'm worried it represents such a radical change in the work-economy that the game would lose its connection with us as players.

Such a setting might be useful as a meta-plot device, with a period of massive system exploitation followed by a Butlerian Jihad. But I think gameplay suffers if machines do all the exploration, piloting, and combat runs.

 

[TKalbfus]

That's why the robots aren't quite there yet. The are dumber and stupider than humans. Robots need supervision to do their jobs properly. In another generation robots ill equal and surpass humanity, but in this setting that day hasn't come yet. Instead robots allow 1 human being to to the work of 100 people with 1 human supervising 99 robots. The work economy is still in effect but the end of all human labor is in sight. This allows for the construction of large space settlements using few people. To give you an idea, robots have no common sense and if left alone, they end up doing stupid and unproductive things through their literal interpretation of the last command they've been given. Robots can walk and talk, they can drive cars and do other simple things, but for more complex tasks they need human supervision.

 

[Evo Plurion]

If we don't want the setting dominated by robots, but we still want a well-developed human presence in the System, simply stretch the timeline out a century or two. Assuming space travel remains limited by the absence of FTL technology, the Solar System could have hundreds of human settlements, some quite large, by the 23rd century, without relying on armies of robots to do all the work.

BTW - I find robots and androids fascinating, especially as they become indistinguishable from humans. I agree that we wouldn't want them to supplant humans as the drivers of expansion and progress. However, it would be a shame to limit their presence arbitrarily for the sake of adhering to the original Traveller framework. I was always disappointed that robots weren't featured more in Traveller. (I played CT and MT, so I don't know if robots became more commonplace in later versions of the game.)

 

[aramis]

I suspect such a 22d Century (2100-2150) setting would be handled by a mixture of robotics and strongly protected small (3-5 person) exploratory ships... with the exploratory craft being highly sheilded, with spin grav Pods... the explorers therein being in charge of a large number of low-intervention automata of various kinds, but within a few LS max range.

I would expect small lunar and orbital colonies to be under construction by the japanese and a few private firms... Martian colonies would probably be few, small and scattered, funded by wealthy nutcases to further their prestige, and using the quality of life of the residents as a propaganda point. I would NOT expect a late 21st nor early 22d century populatio boom outside earth orbitals. I would expect some high-fuel nuclear powered ion drive ships burnign away, unmanned into the outer reaches of the oort cloud... perhaps using slingshots to build even more speed.

 

[TKalbfus]

Evo Plurion said,

If we don't want the setting dominated by robots, but we still want a well-developed human presence in the System, simply stretch the timeline out a century or two. Assuming space travel remains limited by the absence of FTL technology, the Solar System could have hundreds of human settlements, some quite large, by the 23rd century, without relying on armies of robots to do all the work.

But if you stretch the timeline, you have to slow down the progress of robots even more to make them less capable and to require the presence of humans.

A realistic 22nd century would be dominated by robots. If we are lucky these robots would still follow our orders, and in that otimistic situation they would do all the work. Humans would work if they wanted to, but that work would be strictly of a volunteer nature. Consider what robots are capable of now and consider what robots were capable of in 1970. In 1970 robots were fixed automatons, their every move was preprogrammed into a mainframe computer that they were attached to, and they would do repeditive tasks over andover again. Today robots can walk, move about and negotiate terrain very slowly. In another 30 years robots will be quite nimble, they will be able to walk on two legs step over objects and not crash into walls without human direction. I think realistically robots should ne nearly equal to humans, for the RPG I'm assuming that they are less capable than humans, they don't learn as quickly, but once they do learn their software can be copied. I think I would give the typical robot an intelligence of 5 or 4. Alot of skill points need to be expended to make the robot competant in any task, so therefore the robot will be very specialized and incapable of dealing with situations that fall outside their area of expertise. Still alot of work is repedative in building space colonies. Humans would be required to give instructions to these robotic morons when unexpected situations arise, but the labor potential of the humans in attendence is multiplied 100-fold with all these robots. Space colonies will be spacious with alot of open space and relatively few humans who own tracts of land within them. Robot armies will be different, typically the smallest unit will be one officer with 10 robots armed with weapons under his command.

About Solar System development. The Solar System is a huge place, but distance is not as important as gravity potential. Energywise, low Earth orbit is halfway to anywhere else in the Solar System, more than halfway if you consider that you don't have to overcome atmospheric resistance to get to other places in the Solar System form low Earth orbit. To get off of the surface of the Earth, you also need accelerations that are greater than the acceleration due to gravity and the higher the acceleration, the less a proportion of the propellant you use up simply canceling the downward acceleration of gravity. If you have a life support system that can support you indefinitely and a low thrust highly efficient propulsion system, you can go anywhere in the Solar system. You don't have to wait for there to be cities on Mars before you go to Pluto. If you can build a space colony, you can also build a spaceship of the same size and that spaceship can go anywhere in the Solar system at low thrust, and it can grow its own food and recycle its water and oxygen while it gets there. I think that by 2050 to 2070 there could be settlements all over the Solar System, they won't have many people in them except for the ones near Earth, but they will be there. A typical colony might have 1,000 to 10,000 people and 100,000 to 1,000,000 robots. The PCs who travel to these colonies will have to be concerned mainly with the human inhabitants, the robots will typically be in the background and not intelligent enough to provide a threat unless accompanied by humans.

A typical combat encounter would involve 2 groups of 4 humans plus the attendent 2 groups of 40 robots. The robots need to be given orders and be told which targets to shoot at. Generally a robot will continue to fire at the same target over and over again until that target ceases to move, the robot then needs to be given another target or be told to continue firing at the same target. A robot might for instance have difficulty determining whether its target is dead or is simply playing dead. A combat robot has difficulty telling its friends from its enemies so it needs a human to tell it who is who and who to fire at. A robot also has difficulty determining whether to take cover or to expose itself so it can see its target. Robots don't experience fear and have no survival instinct so the robots don't care one way or another.

It is this setting where humans are still needed and set in the 2050 to 2070 time period that I'm talking about.

 

[aramis]

Tom - autonomous operation does not equate to intelligence nor free will.

The "Intelligence" and Decision making processes for complex tasks HAVE NOT been keeping up with the increase in the power of processors.

It is not a "Logical follow-on" that automata will be fully autonomous hands-off machines, nor that they can nor will replace the human brain for recognizing what they look at. (in fact, on the present curve for AI, turly functional AI is more than 100 years off.

All the current probes have been ROV's with some limited autonomy. The best way to make these probes more flexible is to change the lag times from Hours to Seconds, by having a small team in a spin-hab provide near-real-time control and feedback. This will require extensive food growth and biosphere management, but it is doable at our current tech level (not practical, but doable.)

Also, Autonomy and AI are NOT synonomous. Autonomy is already present in some forms. Give it the way points, and let it go.

 

[TKalbfus]

Aramis said,

It is not a "Logical follow-on" that automata will be fully autonomous hands-off machines, nor that they can nor will replace the human brain for recognizing what they look at. (in fact, on the present curve for AI, turly functional AI is more than 100 years off.

In 50 years computers will have more processing power than the human brain! At some point they will reach minimal circuit size and the chips will have to go massively parallel to gian processing power, they'll use nanochips with logic gates that are smaller than human brain cells. Yet you say these will be basically desk top machines with keyboard and mouse, that will just do spreadsheets alot faster? Does this pass the laugh test? lets look at another way, start in 1946 with ENIAC, there were somethings ENIAC could do that humans can also do. What humans could do but ENIAC could not do was the distance between humans and computers for that day and age. As time passed computers could do more work and the distance between computer and human capacities decreased. Alot of people are today out of jobs because computers now do their jobs better. Now are you saying that the distance a computer covers in increased capacity gets less and less with each succeeding year so that it never catches up with humanity?. For instance how about cars that drive themselves?

There have been experimental vehicles that can drive along highways at highway speeds while avoiding collisions.

So will cars of 2020 still have steering wheels?
Will people still have to type on their computers?
Will there be human taxi drivers?

How about 2030?

2040?

2050?
Will there still be cars with steering wheels?
Will people still type on their computers?
Will there still be human taxi drivers?

This future is not looking very futuristic. How is one supposed to tell 2050 from today? Do we just trade in are cars for spaceships with steering wheels?

I think the presence of robots makes the future look futuristic, without them the future just looks like today but in a different setting. Just imagine a restaurant in space with human waiters and chefs.
Or how about a McDonalds with human cashiers in front and cooks in the back who barely speak English.
Will human beings still mow your lawn and tend your garden or will machines do that?

Is there any difference between 2004 and 2050 besides spaceships and ray guns?

If there is not there is clearly something missing.

Its hard to anticipate all the developments in the next 50 years, but one thing is fairly certain, computers will be better than they are today. Now how can they be better without being AI machines? With each passing year it becomes harder to imagine how computers can improve without becoming intelligent. At what point or what year do you think computer technology will become stuck or frozen in place? At what point will it no longer matter whether you have a 10 year old computer or a brand new one? There is not much difference between a 10 year old television set and a more recent model (Except for HDTV), the technology has not changed at all. So your imagining the year 2050 to be an era of stagnent computer science. Cars will probably use up the very last gallon of gas refined from the last barrel of oil and then civilization will collapse because no one can think of anything better. This is what I call the endless 20th century future, kind of boring don't you think?

I prefer more fantastic future settings that aren't thousands of years in the future.

 

[TKalbfus]

My point is 50 years is a long time, its the difference between World War II and today. In World War II we didn't have any computers, most calculations were done by hand. 2050 would have to be so advanced as to make us seem like the World War II generation by comparison, ubiquitous robotics does that. Any low paying job that would normally be done by teenagers or the poorly educated would instead be done by robots. The more analytical higher paying jobs would be done by humans. Lets take the core Traveller classes as an example. The Academic would be unchanged since his key abilities are Intelligence and Education, things at which computers do not excel. Add two zeros at the end of his tarting funds so that it would be $100,000 instead of $1,000. Army soldiers are all officers starting at the rank of 2nd Lieutenant.Army mustering out benefits are:

Cash Benefits
1. $200,000
2. $500,000
3. $1,000,000
4. $1,000,000
5. $1,000,000
6. $2,000,000
7. $3,000,000

The Barbarian class is unaltered, barbarians typically come from third world countries.

 

[aramis]

Originally posted by Tom Kalbfus:
My point is 50 years is a long time, its the difference between World War II and today. In World War II we didn't have any computers, most calculations were done by hand.

Wrong, again. Most computers were dedicated mechanicals, but they did exist. In fact, the fire control on the USS New Jersey was a mechanical computer, and remained so until her decomissioning. It was only marginally slower than the then fastest electronics for finding the needed angles.

Fire control mechanical computers were known by the late 1700's, but really became useful in the late 1800's.

The US census used mechanical computers in the 1880's. Probably before, but I don't have the books to hand.

Cash registers have been around since the 1800's. Again, mechanical computers, but dedicated computers none the less.

Since the 1960's semiconductor revolution, most tech increase has been evolutionary, not revolutionary. Faster, wider, cheaper; not inherently better solutions replaceing older ones. Yes, a number of implementations have been revolutionary for their fields, but the tech itself is not revolutionary.

Take vaccum tubes, for example. It is possible to make them very small, and thus never need semi-conductors, for most 1960's and 1970's tech, the semiconductor is optional. Micro-vacum-tube assemblies can do it. not as power-capable, but none the less doable. The fundamental breakthrough of semi-conductors, however, was one of the last major breakthrough technologies; just now is that starting to mature, as steam had done in WWII. WWII sees the innovation of the transistor; the 1970's saw the transistor mature. Transistor-Transistor Logic has not changed a whit since its 1940's introduction; the specific implementations have gotten smaller, but the same TTL modes are employed to make and, or, nand, xor, nor, and neither gates, which are the basis for digital logic.

The question is, when will the next revolutionary technology come around? Statistically, taking 1600-1900 as the baseline, we're overdue. It appears it may be fibre optic comm. It appears it may be some other physics application.

But, truth be told, the common TL has changed only recently, and we're still maturing 1930's through 1960's technologies to the level where a new breakthrough operational model is needed.

Will robots replace mankind? It is quite likely that they will not achieve sentience within 3-4 centuries. It's not about the hardware; we can already produce computers with more processing power than the human brain (admittedly, they still fill whole rooms). The fundamental revolution for AI to become true sentience is a willpower revolution, and a change to the underlying computer logic probably wouldn't hurt, either... humman brains run synaptic processing; using digital logic to do synaptic processing is not very efficient. Dedicated neural networks of specifically synaptic processors is not just computationally intensive, but quite possibly the wrong mode of operation. Even if a functional human-like brain occurs, will it become sentient? Even if sentient, will it have free will? Is free will part of sentience? Is creativity?

Will society LET sentient computing develop?

will any of the revolutions in science result in real innovations in technology? One is starting: genetics. Fuel cells are not new, just newly practical.

technology in ue always lags FAR behind technology possible. 3-D "printing" as been doable for over a decade; it is finaly commercially available, and still not practical.

 

[TKalbfus]

One thing a computer can do now is run simulations. The more processing power a computer has the more complex the simulation. A simulation can involve any physical process including that which goes on inside the brain. A computer can ultimately simulate a space with a brain inside of it and intepret the inputs and outputs of that simulated brain and translate the outputs to actions and sensor readings to inputs. The computer circuitry doesn't have to be built like the human brain to do this, it just has to be built in parallel so that it can represent a space with a human brain inside of it. One way of thinking about it is that it is a computer run NPC in a computer moderated RPG. Except there is a robot that mimincs every move of the NPC.