The most important bit, however, is probably maintenance and (possibly) expansion. This applies to cyber-space too, especially the expansion bit.
Correct, but that's heavily dependent on how well-automated they are. Lots of automation means there's less and less the actual people need to do.
I don't think that speed of communications has that much to do with speed of government. The big issue is that you need to get a bunch of people with dissimilar, or even opposing, views to agree to the same thing. This is illustrated quite well within the microcosm of the US Republican party's current House majority: the reason why Congress is so unproductive right now is that there's a group of purists that refuse to let anything that fails their ideological purity test pass. Normal situations are less extreme, but when your entire population is part of the primary governing body you become much more vulnerable. Besides, governance is a specialty field, making lots of decisions that almost noone, even those choosing, cares about the details of, so representative democracy makes more sense.
I think you might be misunderstanding how it would work. Likely the 'voting' process would start with an issue submitted to the collective for a vote. They discuss for a given period of time, then everyone votes. If you don't care about the issue, then you don't vote on it.
The problem with representative democracy is that it's not a good way to get what the actual people want. They just have to pick from the representatives that vaguely correspond with what they believe. A direct voting system allows a more honest way to collect public opinion. Right now we don't have the technology to pull it off, but in the future that may not be the case
To use a modern example from recent United States history, in 2012 53% of Americans supported the right for same-sex marriages to be legally binding, while 46% did not. In the theoretical e-democracy, that would carry the motion and gay marriage would be legal. In the real world, gay marriage didn't become legal in the US until 2015, three years after the majority of the population supported it.
A monastic order, perhaps? Maybe some form of ultra-communism or ultra-fascism?
I think the monastic order might be the most interesting. Spiritual enlightenment through physical improvement. Ultra-communism would work well too, though for ultra-fascism we'd likely want to go for control chips and dump the cyberspace aspect.
Most of the "tax" would presumably be in the form of training. Assuming that the government is the primary instigator of reproduction, then they have probably engineered a "useful mixture" of home-bodies and explorers.
Training can be done virtually, and with electronic simulations you don't need instructors. I agree with the second part of that though.
Cybernetics should be EASIER to set up for children, because their brains are still growing. When installing cybernetics, the most important part of the wiring must be done by the neurons, which makes neuro-plasticity highly valuable. Failure to take advantage of this would necessitate either the majority of the population becoming neuro-surgeons, or the process essentially being 100% automated.
I was thinking more along the lines of needing to take out the brains and put them in new cases every year or two. But yes, I see no reason why the process wouldn't be almost 100% automated. If it wasn't automated...
Assuming the cyber-surgery takes 3 hours and they need 12 hours off, a neurosurgeon could do 4 conversions per day.
According to this, in 2013 there was one practicing neurosurgeon for every 65,580 individuals in the US. Up that to a world population of 7 billion, that's 106740 neurosurgeons. The current birth rate as of 2014 is 371520 births per day. Our cyborgs wouldn't even need to increase their ration of neurosurgeons to general population to support full cyberconversion.
And yes, I know that surgeon ratio definitely doesn't hold for the rest of the world but we're assuming a futuristic alien society. In order to support 100% cyborg populations, they'd have had to solve the income, educational, and technological inequalities that create today's 'Third World' nations.
So that the individual that develops, does so with the modified structure as part of their personality. Perhaps they're highly aggressive otherwise. Perhaps the place best suited to the implants becomes surrounded by neural matter as the develop, and the implants must therefor be made as early as possible. Perhaps the implants are literal alternatives to the natural structures, which are too focused on the biological form to be useful in a cybernetic form.
I have no problems with this logic, though we now have to discuss if we want cyborg personality chips (so to speak), and what kind of control the average person really has in this culture.
They could be the victors of a civil war, with the other side being focused on biological "cyborgs" (this was one of my original thoughts on "why at childhood", and the prompting for the replacement-structure bit above). Or they could be the
survivors, and the whole point of the cybernetics is that it allows them to continue surviving.
Perhaps the virtual world is even more about therapy, then being a point all to itself.
joestej wrote:Mix in a few powerful hard-liners, or just a cultural drift towards philosophical purity, and you have a reason: it's counter-intuitive to them to picture someone not wanting a full-cyborg body.
This was what I was originally going for, but it stops holding up the moment one of them speaks up and say "Hey, I kinda wish I was still organic!". Then the debates about morality kick in, etc. If we assume the 'wanna-be organics' are some kind of oppressed counterculture and considered mildly insane by the rest, it fits perfectly.
And once again, civil war and replacement brain structures. If their natural form is itself considered to be the source of problems (remember, these are aliens,
they can be right) then...
Civil war assumes that rebellion is possible, which it wouldn't be with control chips. Though if we assume they HAD a civil war at one point and this is what's left, then the chips make much more sense (if we do want them). Assuming they've nuked their homeworld to radioactive ash some time ago, full-body cyborgs in cyberpunk hive-cities works great, as organics would never survive their homeworld anyway.
The 'VR as therapy' angle likely won't fly though, because if you CAN use it for therapy, why not use it for everything else, especially if the 'real world' is a Fallout-esc cinder?
Uh, no. You need full-blown AI for that. Automation can reduce the things that need to be done "by hand", cyber-reality can make it faster to reach the "chamber of the people", and parsing programs can help with language translation, but the slow bit is, in fact, the process of making decisions. If you can properly automate that, then you already have full AI.
Depends on how you define 'AI', but you are correct. A simple dialog box saying: "Vote on this issue: []Yes []No []Abstain" would be sufficient, they wouldn't need to sift discussions to collect opinions. Don't know where I was going with that.
That's not really how brains work. Sensations mostly arise from interpretation of incoming data, it isn't some sort of program data. They might feel "touch" arising in response to a different location than normal, but if they're going to be swapping bodies productively, then probably they all start out with a mandatory "interaction apparatus" integrated into their implants, and everything gets experienced in the context of the interactions it provides. Otherwise variety is likely to prove impossible (and variety is the whole point).
I'm not remotely qualified to say how one would go about directly stimulating the nerves in someone's brain to create a VR environment that 'feels' like real life, especially for sensations that your brain isn't equipped to emulate. I'm not sure anyone really is. The best we've got right now is a prosthetic DARPA created that creates a 'near-real' sensation when you touch stuff. Not exactly the same thing.
But to keep to the topic on hand, the original point was if individuals who wanted to be organic would create bodies similar to an Umiak or a Loroi to try and live vicariously through their forms. I doubt they would, because they could either use bodies modeled off their own natural forms, or use VR to do it. An alien-shaped cyborg body is you becoming organic again, it's you becoming vaguely like that specific alien race.
Or they're worried about no-one going outside to maintain the machines, so they cultivate a cultural interest in expansion. Or it's their religion, and they want to spread it's light to the universe. Or they have a big long-term plan (escaping the danger of extinction by moving to an artificial universe), and are actively working on the foundations of the project.
How would you cultivate that kind of culture? In a world with seamless VR, you can expand all you want in your virtual space, without difficulty or threat. My original assumption was that they'd be expanding to safe-guard their borders and get more technology to become fully digital. But if they've got realistic VR they wouldn't need that last step, or even to safeguard themselves. Build a massive deep-space colony or SLT generation ship and just stay silent and cold in deep space. Automation and efficient reactors could take care of almost any problems they'd encounter for a very long time.
Oh, you don't have to scrap it. Active participants are more trouble than passive citizens, because they make it harder to make decisions! The problem with VR is getting anyone to go outside to throw away the trash, that is where VR utopias cause problems.
Hence the point of scrapping it. The democracy wouldn't be a democracy if no one participated. And cybernetic brain-shells means never having to take out the trash to get up to pee during a raid!
Deciding the ruling class is easy: participation in the "executive committees" is guaranteed to any citizen... that is actually on-site with their pod, with seniority of experience counting in some way for extra votes. This is roughly how "self-managed" businesses work: you manage yourself, and thus is success made a goal. You'd need occasional exceptions for cases where a central leader is needed, but voting for a "war chief" is no big deal (the Romans not only did it, they had multiple variations on the theme).
I'm somewhat dubious how well that would work, since there were far more Calligulas than their were Cincinnatus in Rome. Once they have the power, what would keep the war chief from just annihilating the executive committee and making himself or herself permanent ruler?