Forcasted Technologies in Science Fiction

[Whatever]

[The problem here is that you have a really stupid definition of personhood. If it has exactly your memories and personality, it is in fact you.

If you made a clone of yourself, stood next to it, and had someone shoot one of the two of you at random, it wouldn't matter to you which one of you dies?

[Prak]

It would matter to each individual body whether it was shot or not. However, that's not the same as "Ohp, my birth body has cancer, time to pop it into cold storage and activate the backup."

[DSMatticus]

Quantum Communication and the Internet: Stuff

Here's the idea behind quantum communicators:
1) Entangle two particles (totally possible).
2) Separate them by a large distance (totally possible).
3) ???
4) MESSAGE RECEIVED (desired result)

No, really; that's not a joke. Nobody has any idea what goes in step 3. Nobody has come up with an experiment that would even theoretically lead to FTL information propagation using quantum entanglement. There's a lot of confusion about quantum entanglement that's been proliferated by popsci (because it is an effect that genuinely propagates faster than light), but the reality is that the only thing you can transmit using quantum entanglement is random noise that is identical to what your receiver sees if you don't transmit at all. The probability distribution of the receiver's bit is exactly the same no matter what the sender does. And completely unsurprisingly, it's impossible to transmit information under those constraints. If you can't influence the observations of the receiver, you can't tell him anything. It's the least feasible thing dropped in this thread. Everything else is at least theoretically possible, and the only question is if some practical constraint will get in the way and fuck everything up or if our theoretical models are wrong. But nobody has discovered a single theoretical basis for FTL communication by quantum entanglement, and supposing that we will find it has about as much evidentiary basis as supposing we will find unicorns. It's an idea built in spite of evidence, not on top of.

Quantum entanglement is practically interesting because quantum computers are the perfect guess-and-check machines, and they move a very large class of problems (problems like prime factorization, whose difficulty is the basis for many modern cryptographic systems) from computationally infeasible to not so hard afterall.

The problem here is that you have a really stupid definition of personhood. If it has exactly your memories and personality, it is in fact you. Exactly like when you teleport over distances, you aren't killing yourself and cloning yourself on the other end, you are just transporting yourself, because there is literally no aspect of you that is in any way meaningful that the new you doesn't also have.

The problem with that is that when you teleport yourself, the machine is doing exactly the thing you said it's not. It kills you, then builds a new you. Or builds a new you, then kills you. Whichever. You can 'jailbreak' your iTeleporter, stop the part where it kills you, and keep the part where it rebuilds you, and now suddenly there are two people who are "in fact you." And that is absurd, and we work backwards from that absurdity to deduce that your teleporter clone is in fact not you.

[Prak]

The problem here is that you have a really stupid definition of personhood. If it has exactly your memories and personality, it is in fact you. Exactly like when you teleport over distances, you aren't killing yourself and cloning yourself on the other end, you are just transporting yourself, because there is literally no aspect of you that is in any way meaningful that the new you doesn't also have.

The problem with that is that when you teleport yourself, the machine is doing exactly the thing you said it's not. It kills you, then builds a new you. Or builds a new you, then kills you. Whichever. You can 'jailbreak' your iTeleporter, stop the part where it kills you, and keep the part where it rebuilds you, and now suddenly there are two people who are "in fact you." And that is absurd, and we work backwards from that absurdity to deduce that your teleporter clone is in fact not you.

Who's to say it's not? There are two bodies, identical down to the atomic level, with the same memories, experiences, and possibly even thoughts. How are they not the same person?

[RadiantPhoenix]

the reality is that the only thing you can transmit using quantum entanglement is random noise that is identical to what your receiver sees if you don't transmit at all. The probability distribution of the receiver's bit is exactly the same no matter what the sender does.

Then what lets us know that the phenomenon exists at all?

[Blicero]

the reality is that the only thing you can transmit using quantum entanglement is random noise that is identical to what your receiver sees if you don't transmit at all. The probability distribution of the receiver's bit is exactly the same no matter what the sender does.

Then what lets us know that the phenomenon exists at all?

I'm assuming this is what DSM meant:

Let's say that we have two systems, A and B. Alice is watching A and Bob is watching B. If A and B are isolated, then either can return a value of 0 or 1 if measured. Normally, these measurements are statistically random.

Now, we can entangle A and B such that, if Alice measures 0 on A, then Bob will measure 1 on B. And if Alice measures 1 on A, then Bob will measure 0 on B. The important thing to note is that this definite-ness occurs as soon as Alice makes a measurement. It is, as far as we know, totally instantaneous: So that's kind of weird and unintuitive. But it's a totally falsifiable hypothesis. So we have lots and lots of experimental data upholding entanglement.

But this doesn't necessarily make entanglement applicable to FTL communication. This is because Alice's measurement is still random. If she measures A, she'll get a 0 or a 1. So then, when Bob measures B, he'll know what Alice got. But Alice has no control over what she gets, which means that the entangled system has no real communicative power.

[Previn]

Who's to say it's not? There are two bodies, identical down to the atomic level, with the same memories, experiences, and possibly even thoughts. How are they not the same person?

One is the original. It existed in time before the copy. The copy, barring time shenanigans has not. It is different, even if it's physically identical down to the subatomic level. The copy was not at your Aunt Julie's wedding with you 4 years before it was copied. It did not sit in the seat, it did not watch the wedding. It does not share the same physical space and so is effected by different subatomic particles and forces, rendering it different even at a subatomic level than you the instant after it's creation.

From the point that the copy was created, it will experience things from a different frame of reference, and in fact will most likely have completely different experiences from the original after that point.

It is not you, the amount of measurable time that it is actually identical to you is so small as to be not worth measuring.

[DSMatticus]

Then what lets us know that the phenomenon exists at all?

Because verifying the phenomenon exists is not the same thing as using it to transmit information. To verify the phenomenon exists, you fire entangled particles at separate receivers in the same room and verify that P_1 is always the opposite of P_2. In order to use the phenomenon to transmit information, you keep P_1, hand P_2 to someone else, and then you have to be able to take some action with P_1 to influence the result of P_2. Turns out you can't do the last part.

You can undertake one binary action with P_1: measure it or not measure it. If you measure P_1, you get a random result [+ (50%), - (50%)], and P_2 gets the opposite of your random result. If you do not measure P_1, P_2 gets a random result [+ (50%), - (50%)]. No matter what you do as the sender (measure, don't measure), the receiver gets the exact same result distribution [+ (50%), - (50%)]. The receiver can't tell if you've measured or not. The receiver does learn what your result was, but that's useless because [See Blicero]. You can't control your result, so it's like trying to communicate with someone by letting them watch you flip a coin.

Note: measuring an entangled particle destroys the entanglement. If you had persistently entangled particles, you could send a message. If you could influence the result of your measurement, you could also send a message. If measured particles behaved differently than unmeasured particles, you could send a message. One of these three things has to be possible for FTL quantum communication. There is no evidence for any of them, and all three disagree pretty heavily with our understanding of quantum mechanics.

Who's to say it's not? There are two bodies, identical down to the atomic level, with the same memories, experiences, and possibly even thoughts. How are they not the same person?

Because they exist simultaneously in different physical locations without having any awareness of one another and have different interests (if you demand one of them die, they will care which one that ends up being). They cannot be the same person. They have a shared origin, certainly, but that's different from being the same person.

[Winnah]

There was an episode of the Outer Limits that dealt with this kind of teleportation. All about the attendant that has to deal with a 'redundancy' when the teleporter falsely reports a malfunction and does not auto dispose of the occupant at his end.

[Prak]

Who's to say it's not? There are two bodies, identical down to the atomic level, with the same memories, experiences, and possibly even thoughts. How are they not the same person?

One is the original. It existed in time before the copy. The copy, barring time shenanigans has not. It is different, even if it's physically identical down to the subatomic level. The copy was not at your Aunt Julie's wedding with you 4 years before it was copied. It did not sit in the seat, it did not watch the wedding. It does not share the same physical space and so is effected by different subatomic particles and forces, rendering it different even at a subatomic level than you the instant after it's creation.

From the point that the copy was created, it will experience things from a different frame of reference, and in fact will most likely have completely different experiences from the original after that point.

It is not you, the amount of measurable time that it is actually identical to you is so small as to be not worth measuring.

It has your ass, it has your memory of Uncle Rickie drunkenly walking up the aisle and pissing all over the priest, it has the same genes that contributed to the flower girl, who was your daughter. Except for the fact that it is standing next to you, rather than the same exact space, it is, in all ways that might matter, you.

Because they exist simultaneously in different physical locations without having any awareness of one another and have different interests (if you demand one of them die, they will care which one that ends up being). They cannot be the same person. They have a shared origin, certainly, but that's different from being the same person.

Why should their existence in different physical locations matter? Their inherent preferences, if such can be said to exist, will be the same, and at the moment the clone is created, they've each gained the same acquired tastes. If you demand one of them die, their desire will be, functionally, the same: "I don't want to die." Or possibly: "I hope the other me gets shot."

Lets try this. Am I the same person as the person who posts from the phone on my person while at school using the screen name Prak_Anima? I exist in a different physical location, though, admittedly, not simultaneously, the old me has no real awareness of the current me, and the current me could well have different desires than the old me. Am I any more or less the same person as I was the last time I posted under this name from a different physical location than I would be if I had been scanned, disassembled and reassembled elsewhere through teleporter technology?

[Korgan0]

Talking to my astrophysics major buddy, our main obstacle to teleporter tech is also a technical issue of being able to scan the entirety of the human body on the atomic level, disassemble it, and reassemble it elsewhere, so we need atomic scanners with high fidelity and advanced 3d printers/nanotech.

However, once we have those, it also gives us instantaneous cloning, we just turn off the disassemble function.

Well, let's not forget the whole problem of personal identity, which is going to freak a hell of a lot of people out.

There are whole areas in Philosophy that revolve around Star Trek transporters and personal identity dilemmas. No bullshit.

I've always felt that my solution to the problem is the most novel: if you've just created a perfect clone with all of your memories, then the one with your house/car keys gets to be the real you for legal purposes.

Funny anecdote: one of my professors always makes clear, whenever he talks about this subject, that Star Trek transporters are immune to this problem, since they turn you into energy and beam you down instead of making out out of different atoms, or something.

[tussock]

Silly people, there is no "you".

MSMatticus is right, the clone is not the same as the "you" it was cloned from, it can't be, all new Carbons and so on. What he misses is that you are also not the same as the "you" it was cloned from. I am not a perfect copy of the me from one second back, and I'm pretty much a total replacement job of the me from a few years back. My brain rewired itself to construct this post, I'm a whole new person now.

"You" are an abstract concept. It's just a model of the world that makes things easier to categorise, remember, and predict. Like "solids" or "down", "you" is not an accurate model when one looks at it seriously.

[Kaelik]

[The problem here is that you have a really stupid definition of personhood. If it has exactly your memories and personality, it is in fact you.

If you made a clone of yourself, stood next to it, and had someone shoot one of the two of you at random, it wouldn't matter to you which one of you dies?

Obviously I would have two simultaneous preferences. Because both of those are me, and to pretend otherwise is farcical.

The problem here is that you have a really stupid definition of personhood. If it has exactly your memories and personality, it is in fact you. Exactly like when you teleport over distances, you aren't killing yourself and cloning yourself on the other end, you are just transporting yourself, because there is literally no aspect of you that is in any way meaningful that the new you doesn't also have.

The problem with that is that when you teleport yourself, the machine is doing exactly the thing you said it's not. It kills you, then builds a new you. Or builds a new you, then kills you. Whichever. You can 'jailbreak' your iTeleporter, stop the part where it kills you, and keep the part where it rebuilds you, and now suddenly there are two people who are "in fact you." And that is absurd, and we work backwards from that absurdity to deduce that your teleporter clone is in fact not you.

No, the Problem here is that "you" is a completely arbitrary term that we use to apply to a concept which is not actually true. "You" is a term for a specific arrangement of molecules, but yet it also isn't, because on a second by second basis you are changing what constitutes you.

The entire point is that there can be multiple "you"s at once very easily, and the only thing that changes is that after multiple "you"s exist "simultaneously" they can begin to differentiate. If you kill one of them before any differentiation, then there is no reason to declare that one of two identical versions is not you.

The bottom line is that "red ball" means a ball that is red, and there can be as many red balls as you want that all fit that description, likewise "you" is a description of specific characteristics, and unless you believe one of those characteristics is "has my immortal soul that Jesus loves" there is absolutely no quality that a perfect clone would not also have, so the difference between A and A plus 5 seconds is not any less than the difference between A and A' plus 5 seconds. If A dies at a moment when A' is identical to A, then there is no reason to attempt to differentiate the two with two separate names, just like if you had two red balls, and one of them spontaneously combusted, you would not call the red ball 2 "the red ball 2" anymore, you would just call it "the red ball."

[Hicks]

I have never understood why everyone is so freaked out by cloning machines, I always thought that a teleport that insta-cloned you far away and then killed you was a stupid idea; when identical twins are born no one is going to kill one because the other was placed in a different room in the hospital. It should be like getting a brother who shares your hopes, motivations, and most intimate secrets, an ally and trustworthy confidant, and would inherit whatever you or anyone else set aside for them in a will. Naturally, clones not mentioned in wills do not inherit, but I am sure there has been a case where one twin inherited something and the other (who is genetically identical) got bupkuss.

If you grow an organ in a vat, you are the proud owner of an organ in a vat. If you have an identical twin (i.e. clone) running around having a life, it is considered bad form to take their kidneys and leave them in a seedy motel bathtub full of ice. My limit is the brain, as soon as it can live while not on life support you no longer have a sack of organs in a vat but a person.

[Kaelik]

I always thought that a teleport that insta-cloned you far away and then killed you was a stupid idea; when identical twins are born no one is going to kill one because the other was placed in a different room in the hospital. It should be like getting a brother who shares your hopes, motivations, and most intimate secrets, an ally and trustworthy confidant, and would inherit whatever you or anyone else set aside for them in a will. Naturally, clones not mentioned in wills do not inherit, but I am sure there has been a case where one twin inherited something and the other (who is genetically identical) got bupkuss.

There is a difference between a genetic twin and a molecule by molecule clone. One of those has similar genetics but will grow up subject to different interactions, and end with a different personality and different preferences.

The other one loves your girlfriend exactly as much as you do, was hired to work at the exact same place you do, and sleeps in the same bed you do.

[Username17]

the reality is that the only thing you can transmit using quantum entanglement is random noise that is identical to what your receiver sees if you don't transmit at all. The probability distribution of the receiver's bit is exactly the same no matter what the sender does.

Then what lets us know that the phenomenon exists at all?

What we have done is to check both sides of entanglement near simultaneously and then demonstrated that they both changed simultaneously despite significant distance between them. Right now we don't have anything stable enough to send real information - our distant particles are only getting about 80% correlation.

DSM is fapping to the Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. This interpretation was decent enough for the time, but is almost certainly not true. Our universe appears to include Warp Drive and Worm Holes and all kinds of shit that the Copenhagen interpretation was intended to exclude. Basically, the Copenhagen interpretation is supposed to maintain causality in the face of Relativity. Thus, the inability of any information to travel faster than light is a given assumption before the Copenhagen interpretation even attempts to explain the universe - everything else is post hoc.

The explanations for why you couldn't send information through an entangled particle pair in Copenhagen quantum mechanics are unsatisfying and hand wavy precisely because they are not derived from experimental data. They are an increasingly strained set of epicycles that are patched onto the framework of physics to preserve the concept that we live in a causal universe. But let's face it: we almost certainly don't.

-Username17

[K]

Stupid causality always getting up in my shit.

[Zinegata]

FTL is nice and all, but it's still probably a few decades away from any workable prototype unless somebody gets really lucky.

I'd be more interested in techs that could see maturity within our lifetimes - for instance Drone technology. It's seriously the only thing that US Air Force has made in the past 15 years that's not made of fail, to the point that people are now seriously considering making the F-35 the last manned US fighter ever.

Of course, that also runs the risk of Skynet taking over the world, but I vote to keep moving forward. Progress, people!

[Grek]

I would like to state that I disagree with Frank, but will not debate the point further because two people that aren't quantum physicists debating quantum physics on a board about table top game design is fucking retarded.

[RadiantPhoenix]

[stuff about entanglement]

So, how do we know that what we're seeing isn't the equivalent of, "I have two opaque boxes, a black marble, and a white marble. I put a random marble in each without looking. If I give one box to someone and send them a lightyear away, and then they open their box and I open mine, I know instantly what they found."?

EDIT: But maybe fuzzier and more Quantum-y.

[Username17]

[stuff about entanglement]

So, how do we know that what we're seeing isn't the equivalent of, "I have two opaque boxes, a black marble, and a white marble. I put a random marble in each without looking. If I give one box to someone and send them a lightyear away, and then they open their box and I open mine, I know instantly what they found."?

EDIT: But maybe fuzzier and more Quantum-y.

Because in our marble example, I can change the marble in my box from white to black, and when I do I instantly know what they will find in their box, because it will have at the same time changed from black to white.

The Causality argument is that if the universe is causal then there has to be some reason that this won't work to send information back and forth by switching or not switch the colors of the marbles at specific points in (potentially pre-arranged) time. There are actually several suggested reasons why it might not work which have varying degrees of plausibility.

But the problem is: there's no actual reason to believe any of them. Because none of them were created to explain any experimental result, they were all created to rescue the assumption that causality had to be a thing. Similarly, there are all kinds of arguments as to why you couldn't send or not send shit through wormholes in order to get information across the universe in less than the time it would take a radio signal to do the same. These mostly boil down to "mumble mumble quantum gravity or something", because there is as yet no observable effect that would stop you from having a schedule where you sent or did not send stuff through a wormhole in order to convery information to receivers on the other end.

But for some reason, a lot of physicists get their panties in a bunch trying to defend causality. There's no special evidence that we live in a causal universe, but it's philosophically satisfying to people that causes and effects be linked in a followable chain back to the Prime Mover or something.

-Username17

[Vebyast]

Of course, that also runs the risk of Skynet taking over the world, but I vote to keep moving forward. Progress, people!

Much as I joke about robot armies, lolnonotforanotherthirtyyears.

Other fun facts: aerial vehicles are actually about the easiest mobile robots to do, comparatively speaking, because airplanes are so expensive that adding an AI is only an incremental bump in the cost. And because aerospace engineering is already so seat-of-the-pants that even a half-baked controller can make things better. That's what the original fly-by-wire systems were, after all.

I think that we'll probably see large-scale aerial vehicles (everything bigger than a Cessna) become fully automated within the tech generation. The only industries that iterate slower than non-wartime aerospace are Big Oil and the RIAA, so call it forty years. Smaller-scale vehicles are a lot harder because people want them to fly around indoors. We're getting there (University of Pennsylvania's quadcopters, that dragonfly MAV that was going around last week), but it's a much more difficult problem. On the other hand, you can iterate on those quite a bit faster. It's a tossup which will get to full-scale deployment first; my bet is on MAVs, but for all we know they could announce a conversion program for one of their older systems tomorrow.

Land robots are a whole different story. The first driverless car is probably going to be in production in the next 5 to 10 years. At this point it's just a question of getting the cost of the laser scanners down; those things are seriously the largest cost of a unit, including the original car. General-purpose mobile robots are more like 30 years out. I work on mobile manipulation and right now our Terminators can't even make sandwiches. And even if they could our food would probably arrive covered in hydraulic fluid.

Speaking of this, one of the things that I've always wanted to see is the sci-fi equivalent of the Summoner. Someone that just walks around with a little drone army following them around and all of their abilities are them ordering their drone army to do things. I'm trying to do this in a game using this Clockwork Centurion feat I found, and it seems reasonable to give something like this to engineers.

[Username17]

Speaking of this, one of the things that I've always wanted to see is the sci-fi equivalent of the Summoner. Someone that just walks around with a little drone army following them around and all of their abilities are them ordering their drone army to do things.

Shadowrun has had that for a long time.



Drone Riggers is what the game calls them.

-Username17

[Vebyast]

Speaking of this, one of the things that I've always wanted to see is the sci-fi equivalent of the Summoner. Someone that just walks around with a little drone army following them around and all of their abilities are them ordering their drone army to do things.

Shadowrun has had that for a long time.

Yeah, I guess my not-having-read-shadowrun is showing. How'd they compare to the other classes balace-wise and involvement-in-minigames-wise? In a reasonably "realistic" setting, being able to throw a gun drone around a corner would be ridiculously powerful and dirt cheap, plus scouting and being able to be in multiple places at once.

[Username17]

Speaking of this, one of the things that I've always wanted to see is the sci-fi equivalent of the Summoner. Someone that just walks around with a little drone army following them around and all of their abilities are them ordering their drone army to do things.

Shadowrun has had that for a long time.

Yeah, I guess my not-having-read-shadowrun is showing. How'd they compare to the other classes balace-wise and involvement-in-minigames-wise? In a reasonably "realistic" setting, being able to throw a gun drone around a corner would be ridiculously powerful and dirt cheap, plus scouting and being able to be in multiple places at once.

Drone Riggers are OP. Their offensive output is significantly more than that of street samurai, their startup costs are less (in terms of both money and skill point expenditure), and their primary skills make them good at several kinds of surveillance and intrusion by default.

More information will vary depending on edition. For example: I just posted the image of the cover of a 2nd edition book. But I could have just as easily posted a picture of a drone rigger from Fourth Edition.

-Username17