Y'know, nowhere in that description do I see evidence of "evil" A.I.'s twirling their digital mustaches and sending humans into their massive titanium human grinders as sacrifices to the robot devil. The whole thing sounds more uncontrolled than malicious; a group of A.I.'s make the jump from weak to strong, and begin a massive upgrading spree without so much concern for those around them. That's the sort of thing that can cause global panic (and subsequent warfare) by accident. Also, notice the bit where it says these A.I.'s take off with millions of uploads in tow. I doubt it's to keep them around and torture them for kicks.
__________________ "I did my work slowly, drop by drop. I have torn all of it out of me by pieces."
--Maurice Ravel
For all we know (at this point) the uploads were voluntary. Or perhaps they were an attempt to save as much of humanity as possible from something (the exsurgen virus perhaps?). They may have enough DNA information to grow new bodies out there somewhere.
Who knows? I'm holding off on the 'evil robots' judgement and will wait to see the game before passing judgement.
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Y'know, nowhere in that description do I see evidence of "evil" A.I.'s twirling their digital mustaches and sending humans into their massive titanium human grinders as sacrifices to the robot devil. The whole thing sounds more uncontrolled than malicious; a group of A.I.'s make the jump from weak to strong, and begin a massive upgrading spree without so much concern for those around them.
"The evil AIs who blew up the world actually believe themselves to be acting in humanity's best interests" is such an oft-employed "twist" that it's become a cliché in its own right, mind. Heck, it even turns up in a recent Will Smith movie.
Since I consider both Stross and Morgan to be lousy writers recycling tired ideas, this isn't exactly a selling point for me. Modern transhumanist novels are mostly junk. THS was exemplary because it avoided so many of the cliches of these kind of novels. Now if you had said Alfred Bester or PK Dick or Stanislaw Lem you'd have an instant sale...
And I thought Blue Planet was the benchmark for hard-science settings, not THS.
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"The evil AIs who blew up the world actually believe themselves to be acting in humanity's best interests" is such an oft-employed "twist" that it's become a cliché in its own right, mind. Heck, it even turns up in a recent Will Smith movie.
It's freaking Freudian, it is the imperative drive of the child to supplant the father and become him to produce the next generation of children. It's the same as the Titans and the Gods and it's no different with humans and their intelligent techology.
C.
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"The evil AIs who blew up the world actually believe themselves to be acting in humanity's best interests" is such an oft-employed "twist" that it's become a cliché in its own right, mind. Heck, it even turns up in a recent Will Smith movie.
How many roleplaying games do you know that do it explicitly? And no, Exalted doesn't count ;P
It's freaking Freudian, it is the imperative drive of the child to supplant the father and become him to produce the next generation of children. It's the same as the Titans and the Gods and it's no different with humans and their intelligent techology.
I'm not interested in psychoanalysing anything - I'm merely pointing out that it's been done before. You don't need to draw abstruse mythological parallels to establish this when there are plenty of examples within the genre itself to refer to.
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Originally Posted by zenten
How many roleplaying games do you know that do it explicitly?
As people from Catalyst Games seem to be looking at this thread, can i be cheeky and inquire as to the status of Degenesis??
That said, I thought Eclipse Phase sounded interesting. I liked Richard Morgan's Takeshi Kovacs books (haven't read Reynolds though).
Also I didn't spot anything saying the military AI's were "Evil", it just seems to me they went in a bit hardcore with the species engineering! I suppose it depends what the desired outcome of this tinkering is!
Macroscale projects nearly always look unpleasant on a Microscale.
It tries more than most, despite some shaky engineering details. If one realises that SF hardness is relative, not a binary absolute, it's on the hard side by RPG standards (not that that is saying a huge amount, obviously).
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