winks at starboi

WEE OKI RAMBLE INCOMING

So I'm computer science as fuck, and there's a prevailing idea in computer science that we will begin augmenting humans very soon, and that these augmented humans will become the new dominant class of humans - either because the wealthy are the only ones that can afford it anyway, or those that have the treatment have the superior skills over the rest of humanity to amass the most resources. Many contemporary CEOs like Elon Musk believe that we will figure out how to make humans immortal within the next hundred years (and most estimates are shorter than that, because CS majors are also very optimistic lmao).

And so far, what we know about our world supports this.
- Robot AIs are already better at performing knee surgeries than human surgeons, suggesting that human surgeons will be phased out in the future.
- AI is more accurate and faster at diagnosing autism in children than child psychologists specializing in autism (matter of minutes versus matter of weeks for getting the diagnosis). This, along with other things, suggests that diagnosing illnesses will be replaced by AI in the future (and there's a fuckton of funding for this, too, this is not fringe science).
- Humans naturally treat all other animals as inferior - while pets have luxuries, most Western societies take extremely poor care of their livestock, and developing countries are following suit. Because of this, it's predicted that augmented humans will treat regular humans as inferiors.
- The stock exchange is run by AI. Humans can no longer keep pace with the stock market; thus, no economists and/or computer scientists know for absolute certainty how the economy works anymore. AI already made the stock market crash in 2010 and we still don't know why this happened. Nevertheless, the stock market is still overrun and controlled by AI.
- AI is by no means sentient. It can be made more intelligent than humans (like diagnosing autism in children), but it is not sentient. We have no idea if AI will become sentient, but it's theorized that AI will become sentient when humanity breaks the singularity. Which, for the purposes of the site not being completely scifi as fuck in the human section, we will pretend isn't going to happen.

Because of this, it's theorized that a couple of things will happen.
- Like previously stated, augmented humans will become the dominant class because they will be superior to humans intellectually, while still having sentience.
- Most of human society will be run by AI, like how the stock market in current time today is run by AI. In this group, this would mean that AI would run everything from the economy to the police, and the augmented humans are the ones monitoring it / tweaking it / making it better.
- Regular humans will essentially be useless to the "grand order" of things, and each individual will only be useful for their skills that are better than what AI can do. Because of the fact there are very few jobs that humans are better than a fully realized AI, this means that most of the population is homeless / jobless / ect. The remaining humans are still inferior to the augmented human class, but aren't piss broke.

(If you want to do more research into this outside of rp bc it's frankly just fascinating, I highly recommend reading Homo Deus)

SO that's what many people in my line of work (people making these AIs) think our world is going to become. This should sound somewhat familiar, because most science fiction these days borrows various points about this future to tell the scifi story - Star Trek assumes that humanity will realize a wonderful utopia, Judge Dread assumes that the world is going to become a fucking hellhole for most of humanity.

SO this brings me to the idea of this new group. Cyberpunk as fuck, with most of the society being useless jobless humans, with a middle class of skilled humans (who risk being jobless at any notice if an AI replaces their job tbh), and augmented humans. As well as the AIs running everything, but the AIs naturally wouldn't be playable.

Agreed, there need to be limits. Here's some of my ideas.

- While augmented humans can have things like mechanical eyes and prosthetic limbs, they can't have any augments directly done to their brain. This would make sense with current tech, because brains are really hella complicated and we're barely beginning to understand how they actually work. Because of this, it seems likely that human brains won't be easily "upgraded." In game, this would mean that humans and augmented humans would have roughly the same reaction time, short term memory, critical thinking skills, ect.
So they would be on the same "raw" intellect, though it would be true that augmented humans typically have a higher level of education. That being said, I'm sure we all know people that are dumb as a rock with a college degree and smart cookies that only have a GED to their name.

- Electronics are notoriously weak to water. Hell, even hot enough temperatures can weaken/warp steel. So, just because an augmented human could be covered in metal prosthetics, they wouldn't be able to godmode against someone with elemental powers - or even someone wielding a fire hose.

- Most bleeding edge tech for prolonging lifespans / augmenting organs has to do with growing human organs in a lab, not replacing organs with a mechanical thingymawatchit. Due to this, augmented humans would still have physical limitations like max heartrate / lung capacity - they wouldn't be superhuman. They'd still be vulnerable to the same diseases regular humans are, though they would have more money for treatments / better healthcare in the biased society.

- I can't see a way in which augmented humans would have an immunity against telepathic / mental attacks purely because of their augmentation?

I'm not sure if there are any other areas where we might need to add balancing rules.