Positronic Brain Invention Date (Poll)

[niennab]

We're looking to push back the positronic brain invention date and by extension, IPC chassis'. This will allow for a more realistic progression of the lore, The Trinary Perfection, and the legal footing IPCs have acquired in places such as Tau Ceti. Moreover, this opens up the possibility for more diverse character creation, and resolves a few issues pertaining to shells having only been around for 5 years. This issue is largely seen when both a prototype and advanced shell are either the same age, or a few years apart. The changes won't force you to change your character's manufacturing date, but the option will be there.

The current positronic brain invention date is 2437.

Please explain your reason why.

Edited September 21, 2020 by niennab

[Doc]

I don't really think there's any meaningful difference between these three options from a player perspective*, frankly; are there other notable years in lore where things happened that it would matter if positronics were invented before or after them? I have no idea. I'm not interested in diving to find out. However, I do think positronics being a """somewhat""" recent invention to the galactic timeline is important to a number of their central facets; the "problems that haven't been solved" regarding synthetic sentience, life, and similar.

The longer they've been around, the harder it becomes to reasonably believe that no substantial progress has been made, and will make further developments need to be smaller and slower to avoid being seen as unnecessarily revolutionary; the newer they are to the setting, the more reasonably it can be said that a new development is just "we've figured out how we want to handle this," rather than "we're going to completely uproot how we've already established we want to handle this in favor of something new" (ex. the longer positronics have been around, the less the Sol Alliance's position can be reasonably said to be "we've just never bothered to give them rights once they were invented", and the more rigidly defined it would be as "we definitively decided they do not have rights".)

But, maybe, this isn't even enough of a time difference for that to matter at all? I don't know. Ultimately, the affects of this decision in that regard should really be more up to you and how you plan to go forward, rather than a community vote, I think; or if you still want it to be a community vote, I think it should be with the context of the actual tangible affects that the different options might result in, rather than just three different years that, as far as I'm aware, don't really have any meaning.

(*I really don't think the literal age of an individual player's unit matters at all. They can be manufactured, 'raised', 'trained', and sent out to work as fast as you can imagine. An IPC on the Aurora can be a week old, or it could be one of the oldest still-functioning units.)

Edited September 14, 2020 by Doc

[The Stryker]

Given the amount of characters involved, we wanted to make sure this was a decision everyone was onboard with as opposed to "suddenly my character backstory is kind of unrealistic." For the whole you hit all the points we wanted to tackle here:

No change and things stay the same, the older they get, the more "normalized" they get and indeed we're going to have to rewrite things such as Solarian IPC rights as you said. 30 years, after all, is enough time for a whole other generation of Solarians to have lived with machines their whole lives.

[Carver]

I'm all for using this to reasonably justify technological advancements, but I'm fully against using this in any way to justify further civil rights for IPCs in various cases.

[niennab]

46 minutes ago, Carver said:

I'm all for using this to reasonably justify technological advancements, but I'm fully against using this in any way to justify further civil rights for IPCs in various cases.

This isn't to justify further civil rights. This is to better explain how IPCs have the present freedoms they have.

[Boggle08]

The rollback would allow people to fit in more lore into the setting pertaining to IPC's, and, as the OP stated, provide a more natural flow for what we currently have within the lore. I do not think this is inconsequential for character backstories at all. I feel a lot of character backstories for IPC's have to be extremely compressed, especially when it comes to the younger models. People are either incapable of not fitting in enough and keep it brief, or they have to stack and overlap events in their backstories in order to cram everything together. 

On the matter of IPC rights, I do hope that the unique vulnerabilities our robots have in-setting are preserved when the date rollback happens, and that the justification from the powers that be is strong. I'm certain the lore team will account for this, however.

[Arrow768]

I am getting mixed signals here.

3 hours ago, The Stryker said:

No change and things stay the same, the older they get, the more "normalized" they get and indeed we're going to have to rewrite things such as Solarian IPC rights as you said. 30 years, after all, is enough time for a whole other generation of Solarians to have lived with machines their whole lives.

1 hour ago, niennab said:

This isn't to justify further civil rights. This is to better explain how IPCs have the present freedoms they have.

 

[NewOriginalSchwann]

Moving it backs allows more lore opportunities and, as NiennaB stated, allows a more natural flow. IPC lore has always felt hyper-compressed to me, and it's often hard for me to justify them being so young (~30 years) and so prevalent. Shells in particular have always bugged me: they're one of our most prevalent IPC types in lore, and are five years old in our setting. In five years they've managed to go everywhere in the Orion Spur (especially corporations such as Idris) and become a political problem in many factions. It's never really made sense to me when I think hard about it. It also creates awkward scenarios wherein a modern, top-of-the-line-perfectly-human shell and uncanny valley prototype shells are divided by a few years at best and months at worst. This will also help the Trinary Perfection greatly, as it gives them time to expand to something beyond a weird, recently formed fringe group.

Quote

I feel a lot of character backstories for IPC's have to be extremely compressed, especially when it comes to the younger models.

I've felt this often when making IPCs. It's hard to make a compelling backstory with, give or take, five years for a shell and I'm often left feeling unsatisfied. At worst, I sometimes feel like I've made a Mary Sue that progresses through everything super rapidly and can't make any mistakes as I write a character's journey to the Aurora in the space of only a few years. My backgrounds often end up feeling like a compressed mess of overlapping events and occurrences taking place at a breakneck pace.

Regarding IPC rights, I have full confidence that the synthetic team will handle their precarious situation well. If anything, their rights seem to have progressed extremely quickly in thirty years and this will help it seem more reasonable.

My vote is to move the clock back thirty years, to 2407, in order to give the most room for IPCs to grow in our lore.

[Scheveningen]

10 hours ago, Doc said:

The longer they've been around, the harder it becomes to reasonably believe that no substantial progress has been made, and will make further developments need to be smaller and slower to avoid being seen as unnecessarily revolutionary; the newer they are to the setting, the more reasonably it can be said that a new development is just "we've figured out how we want to handle this," rather than "we're going to completely uproot how we've already established we want to handle this in favor of something new" (ex. the longer positronics have been around, the less the Sol Alliance's position can be reasonably said to be "we've just never bothered to give them rights once they were invented", and the more rigidly defined it would be as "we definitively decided they do not have rights".)

I'll be honest, historical precedent with certain human demographics in real life have been nothing short of often showing that even this is 'normal' in the sense that it can take more than a hundred years before any appreciable change is made in terms of civil rights. Likewise it indicates that the state of IPCs may require an IC revolution for them to claw out of being treated as property.

[niennab]

9 hours ago, Arrow768 said:

I am getting mixed signals here.

This was half my mistake for not reading Stryker's response before addressing someone else entirely. Stryker isn't saying that we will be changing or giving rights to Solarian IPCs, but rather the change in dates will mean that we have an opportunity to detail differing sentiment or views on IPCs in the time they have been around.

Conceptually, IPCs are and forever will be the underdogs of our setting. They benefit by this and we do not intend to do away with it.