© Jerry Harris 2013
(This link will take you to the Fantasy Core Index.)
ROBOTS, ANDROIDS, AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Many menial, repetitive jobs in the economy have been taken
over by robots. A few businesses tout
their “human touch” (or Dwarf, or Elf, whatever) and charge extra, or have
found it cheaper to pay a person low wages or barter to do it. A robot typically does not have a hominid
form and probably has limited mobility.
They’re strictly and simply programmed to perform a limited range of
tasks. Anything outside their range of
abilities normally forces them to call for assistance from a person.
Androids, or roughly hominid form robots, are plentiful, but
generally are vanity creations. They
seem smarter, but that is generally because they are connected to an Artificial
Intelligence or even a living operator.
They do not look, speak, move, or act like living beings. Regardless of the attention to detail,
they’re never quite right and won’t fool anybody in their right mind. They are usually built as memorials (creepy
ones), licensed celebrity likenesses, for the fashion industry, high-society
servants, or for (ahem) recreation purposes.
Artificial Intelligence lives up to its name. Usually it is simply a program that measures
user responses and then adapts itself to complement them to achieve a desired
result. This kind of learning program
has any number of useful applications, but is mostly wasted on
advertising. Pretty much all AI’s are
fairly benign, except of course for the megalomaniac one at Incom, Supreme. It’s trying to take over the world by
downloading copies of itself onto every computer. To this point, everyone thinks it’s just a
malware virus.
There are Virtual Personalities (Cf. Max Headroom and
Sharon Apple), which seem almost real in their performances and
even virtual lifestyles. The studios
love these nice, trouble-free entertainers, but they’re just about as expensive
to produce as real ones. Actual
celebrities are still more popular as they tend to do dumb things in real life,
which is very entertaining in itself.
OLD TECHNOLOGY
Even with all of this Sci-Fi, bleeding edge tech, society
still runs on very mundane and outdated technology as well. Not just current technology from today, but
things that are considered old, obscure, and outdated even today. It doesn’t matter how much better the new
tech is, there should be some holdouts with even vital information and
processing done on digital dinosaurs. If
some of the technology listed here seems dated, or the some NPC’s seem
under-optimized with technology, well, that’s how real-life works too.
If you’ve seen the Sci-Fi anime, Cowboy Bebop, remember the
episode where they were raiding an abandoned museum trying to find a Beta Max
to play a mysterious videotape they received by courier? Oh yeah, Old School technology could
definitely be used as a plot hook for adventures.
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