The Goth Club

Ok, WTF are we talking about this week?

Telepresence. Telecommuting. Virtual Offices. The art of doing work from home.

2002 AD: Teleoperated hands with haptic feedback developed by Japanese prove to be successful and become implemented in many industries where deft handling is required but too dangerous for living people.

… or like all those smug Intel ads would have you believe, from under a tree on a delightfully sunny day while you’re a lot more attractive for owning a Centrino based device (even though the CPU has absolutely zero impact on the mobility and wireless connectivity of a device… but y’know, whatever, most consumers are too stupid to know the difference).

So fucking what, right? Telepresence is something that’s been done for ages. Nothing new there, right? I man, I do my job by telepresence three days a week because to work online doesn’t actually require you to be in any particular office location.

But what if you could phone it all in. You’re entire life. Live virtually through some kind of artificial agent. An android, replicant, surrogate.

2048 AD: Bruce Willis decides to actually get real life surrogates made and continue making sequels until cloning becomes legal

Which is basically the premise of the comic The Surrogates, of which the recently released film with Bruce Willis (+ Bruce Willis from Moonlighting) is based on.

The movie sort of weakens the premise of the comic because it doesn’t go into the depth, but what can you expect in 88 minutes, right? That depth, unfortunately puts a lot of holes in the premise of the film.

Obviously, there are some great uses for this tech, namely fighting wars without any real loss of life to your own site. But the civilian level seems rather implausible. What use is there for this other than being “100% physically safe” at all times, and being able to be young and pretty, and looking however you like, until you die of old age (or a malignant abscess because you never move)?

The idea of still working any real kind of job, other than ones that involve extreme hazard to one’s self (such as law enforcement) via surrogate is kind of ridiculous. Especially people that work lower tier jobs (such as Agent Greer’s wife in the film. How would a robo-beautician’s salary provide enough money for the level of quality surrogate she has?).

Some would argue you may as well go into a virtual world, like 2nd Life for this sort of activity, and with the advances espoused by the movie, surely graphics and haptic feedback issues are resolved. Technically speaking, we can do this right now if the virtual worlds are enabled. As in my previous post on this subject, we have virtual worlds, we have full immersion visual and auditory gear. We have basic haptic feedback happening. There’d be no need for this sort of tech for civilian usage.

This all begs a few questions:

• What the hell happens to the hospitality industry if everyone’s going around in a robot? No need to meet for coffee anymore, and you do all your eating at home! Billions of dollars of jobs and industry gone, just like that! Where does all the surplus labour go?
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  2055 AD: "Women's" soccer finally gets noticed on TV. All athletes are actually fat, mid 50s men living in their mothers basements

  For that matter, what happens to athletics if it’s just a case of what can be built?

• Would all popular spectator sport now become ultra violent because it finally can? If so, would the ratings change so that children can no longer watch or participate in sports?
• If the ratings change for sport, will they change for porn as it’s no longer degrading for “real” women?
• Will we get an R18+ rating for video games when real life becomes much worse?
• What if you’re suicidal and forget to put the gun to your actual head and blow your surrogates CPU out instead… Will your medical insurance cover the therapy for trauma over being such an amazing failure you can’t actually commit suicide properly?
• Would you use your surrogate to give yourself a Stranger treatment?
• Can Surrogates actually commit rape if the victim is also a surrogate? The victim can disconnect at any time, and the surrogate is not an actual person.
• Would it be proper for men to go around comparing the size of their ePenises?
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  2060 AD: Otaku the world over decide to get the Gundam surrogates

  How far would you actually go in body modification of the surrogate? The human form is actually amazingly impractical for a lot of things, so surely you’d want to have a few extras added in, such extra limbs… So why bother with a human form at all?

Personally, of all the cyberpunk ideas floating around there, I think the idea of 100% physical surrogacy via telepresence is the least likely to actually happen, even though a lot of the technology to actually make it workable is already on the markets.

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