Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
  • Locked thread
A Buttery Pastry
Sep 4, 2011

Delicious and Informative!
:3:

Owlofcreamcheese posted:

I'm not even thinking highly trained jobs.

I'm talking about like, all the jobs that don't exist now because they are not important enough to hire someone else to do. The way cooking used to be. Maybe the la de da queen could get someone to cook for them but not the common person, they were spending hours cooking at home. Now restaurants are so easy and cheap some people die from eating there too much. I COULD make my own cloths, I vaguely know how to sew, but I don't because I can just have someone in a factory do it for me.

In the future people there will be lots of jobs doing things that were not seen as worth employing people to do, since labor could be more usefully applied to more important things. That's always how it's gone.
Can you come up with one or more examples of what these jobs might be, specifically? Like boner confessor, I'm not entirely convinced by the cooking argument, for I think the same reason.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

A Buttery Pastry
Sep 4, 2011

Delicious and Informative!
:3:

Owlofcreamcheese posted:

I am deliberately avoiding trying to be futurist and making up specific careers because that just pits my specific dumb idea instead of it being the concept that humans have a bunch of unfilled needs and every time they fill them they suddenly realize that instead of being done that all the lesser problems are needs too.
I think the issue I am having with this is, what kind of needs can employ a lot of people, but can't be be automated at a pace where this represents a continuous and deep disruption of society? Note that if people have been automated out of the workforce, they're less likely to be able to support this alternative workforce. Which means people will be competing for the chance to serve the people who haven't yet been automated out of a job.

A Buttery Pastry
Sep 4, 2011

Delicious and Informative!
:3:

boner confessor posted:

ask them why it makes them feel good to imagine someone working hard but getting paid less

also fast food won't be automated any time soon because exactly this kind of person likes to pull petty scams like claiming their order was wrong or that the customer service was bad in order to cadge free food
You only need one person for the job of "Customer Relations Professional" though.

A Buttery Pastry
Sep 4, 2011

Delicious and Informative!
:3:

boner confessor posted:

two people can't yell at one person at the same time, they will fight
Thus keeping the people disunited.

A Buttery Pastry
Sep 4, 2011

Delicious and Informative!
:3:

Nevvy Z posted:

The ultrarich care more about short term money, wealth they could never really meaningfully spend in a human lifetime, than they care about the planet. It's time to sue them as a collective, or failing that a good old peasants revolt.
Should probably aim for something with at least a few wins under its belt.

A Buttery Pastry
Sep 4, 2011

Delicious and Informative!
:3:

Cicero posted:

I think what you see today with kickstarter, patreon, youtube, etc. shows this doesn't have to be the case. You can be moderately popular in the entertainment/art sector with some niche and still make a living. This kind of thing is only going to expand in the future.
People only have so much time. As the number of entertainers go up, the time consumers can spend on average on any artist goes down - undermining the revenue stream that would fund this expansion of "the arts". Like, how many subscribers/backers does an artist need to make a living? That's basically going to define the upper bound for how many artists you can realistically fit in the economy, without instituting a welfare system that makes this art basically just a supplementary income.

A Buttery Pastry fucked around with this message at 13:36 on Dec 4, 2016

A Buttery Pastry
Sep 4, 2011

Delicious and Informative!
:3:

Main Paineframe posted:

Sounds like it was written by someone who's never worked fast food. The manager's role isn't to efficiently tell people how to do things, it's to efficiently yell at people who are doing things wrong, and to adapt to unforeseen situations. "Manna", as described, is basically a glorified scheduler which estimates when things should be done based on statistical analysis and rudimentary sensors - except for some reason it has a synthesized voice, and for some reason the writer thinks the employees would be thrilled to be wearing location trackers so that an annoying computer voice could micromanage their every footstep.
This could be solved by adding electric shock collars for the employees, as well as making it a human-on-the-loop system, where a manager monitoring multiple stores can override the AI as needed.

A Buttery Pastry
Sep 4, 2011

Delicious and Informative!
:3:

mobby_6kl posted:

I wanted to make some point about the changes happening gradually or something but here's a chart of Peak Horse:


What I gather from this is that the number of horses is cyclical, and will reach a new peak around 2100.

A Buttery Pastry
Sep 4, 2011

Delicious and Informative!
:3:

A Wizard of Goatse posted:

ok 'liberal' has finally lost all meaning if STEMlord horseshit counts
At its core, liberalism is about having the freedom to succeed or fail based on your merits (as opposed to having your lineage define your lot in life), which is definitely in line with the whole "Too bad, should've gotten a useful education like me" attitude. Some liberals throw in "But you shouldn't be allowed to fail too much", because that's not cool/that causes instability in the long term which threatens my merit-based position, but the latter is definitely not a core part.

A Buttery Pastry
Sep 4, 2011

Delicious and Informative!
:3:

mobby_6kl posted:

^^^
Dunno how close that is to production, but your kebab job is already hosed:


Is the robot smart enough to hide rot in the meat?

A Buttery Pastry
Sep 4, 2011

Delicious and Informative!
:3:

Owlofcreamcheese posted:

Like you can look at this and just see very easily the action they would need to take to fix the traffic jam:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Suugn-p5C1M

But that is basically never the action actual humans in cars on roads would take. Because of a quirk in human psychology that it doesn't seem like it'd fix things unless you look at it from outside.
You keep calling it "a quirk of human psychology", but isn't it basically just down to sub-optimal communication? Which is where self-driving cars come in, since they can communicate in a manner that would allow them to act in unison to solve traffic jams or to prevent them from forming in the first place. In any case, in regards to the topic of how great an efficiency gain you can get from that, you still have to take people into account as you move into less and less car dominated environments. If a pedestrian can step into the street at any point, then you're not going to be able to have the cars just tearing through the streets at high speeds, you'll have to settle for the cars distributing themselves in more efficient manner.

A Buttery Pastry
Sep 4, 2011

Delicious and Informative!
:3:

Malcolm XML posted:

I just ordered milk and bread online and a dude came in a refrigerated truck and handed them to me.

I live in the cyberpunk dystopia known as "LONDON"
To be fair, London literally is a cyberpunkt dystopia, the capital of an island with more surveillance cameras than people. From their country manors and glittering towers of mammon, their inbred elite hypocritically censor what they masses are allowed to see, while they in their detachment from humanity can find joy only in the most deviant acts of sexual predation, and the degradation of their fellow man. They can buy fresh milk on the internet though.

A Buttery Pastry
Sep 4, 2011

Delicious and Informative!
:3:

Tiny Brontosaurus posted:

You weaken you righteous indignation when you strawman like this. Everything you say smacks strongly of a coddled boojie boy for whom life-threatening poverty is merely an abstraction. Starving and homeless people don't care if their relief is ideologically pure.
They'll care when it gets shut down because no one in power feels the need to even pretend to care anymore.

A Buttery Pastry
Sep 4, 2011

Delicious and Informative!
:3:

Nevvy Z posted:

Yeah... that'll show em...
It has nothing to do with "showing them", it's about how whining about being obsessed with "ideological purity" ignores the fact that we're talking about an incredible meaningful difference in long-term outcomes.

Sure, if you could leverage one into the other eventually then that's great, but UBI seems more like a delaying action while capital gets ready to completely disengage from the public.

A Buttery Pastry
Sep 4, 2011

Delicious and Informative!
:3:

9-Volt Assault posted:

But where does capital disengage to? Without a public to buy its stuff it can't make more money. I guess you could have a situation where the rich only trade with each other, either with products or on the stock market?
Yes, pretty much. Why would you want to involve the public, if they can no longer bring anything to the table? All they would be in such a scenario is a middle man between capitalists, but what practical purpose would they then serve? Getting rid of middle men that eat into your profits is just common sense. But yeah, it would be a very different sort of economy if it's basically a bunch of robots creating luxuries for rich people - or possibly consumer goods for a select few artists and artisans that serve the rich that want an authentic human-made product.

That said, UBI keeping the public in the loop does have its advantages for capitalists who derive a greater than average proportion of their wealth from the public, since it would be a subsidy of their way of doing business. Whether they'll have enough power to prevent UBI from being repealed is another question though, and then there's a question of whether they're going to remain interested in maintaining it, or whether their business model changes into one where it suddenly doesn't make much sense anymore.

Freakazoid_ posted:

That's the first I've heard of UBI being framed in such a way. Could you be more specific?

Taking the means of production is a harder sell than UBI is, but if we can get a lot more people through college, I could see a citizen's dividend becoming more appealing.
What does putting them through college help, in the long run? At some point, no amount of college is ever going to let the majority of the population catch up with where technological progress has put their artificial rivals.

Tiny Brontosaurus posted:

This is ivory tower bullshit. People need help now. Mincome is a longshot but at least it's only one policy, which is a lot simpler than rebuilding the entire economic fabric of the country. You don't feel any urgency because the problems of poverty aren't real to you.
That's kinda the issue. The balance of power is so massively in favor of capital that they can pretty much offer anything, and people will take it in their desperation, ignoring the fact that it can be taken away again when capital feels it's safe. This has basically been happening since the late 70's, but at least there was still some sort of job market for the majority of people. If UBI is implemented in 2030, then slowly let die from 2060 and forward because it's no longer beneficial to the people in power, then it basically means a complete separation of the economy into two parts. One high-tech, which serves the rich, and one which is based around whatever technologies people can still run and power as they slowly attempt to rebuild an industrial economy. Except this time they'll have to contend with the fact that the world is more populous, there are fewer easily accessible resources, and those resources might already be claimed by a bunch of automated robots. Eventually you could see the majority of society regress into basically a wood-fueled civilization, whose high-point was basically the Napoleonic Era, when the world had a population of around a billion people.

A Buttery Pastry
Sep 4, 2011

Delicious and Informative!
:3:

Tiny Brontosaurus posted:

Oh boy, let's add Malthus into the mix too, we needed a racist doomsday cultist. Don't make the rookie futurist mistake of assuming the future will be everything the same as now, only more so. Birthrates plummet when people's basic needs are met, and they continue to drop as they attain education and luxury entertainments that compete with sex, like TV and video games. Western birthrates have been falling for years, and are below replacement rates in some places. A well-tended populace will not outnumber ours. That lie has been trotted out as the excuse for why we shouldn't fight poverty and starvation since the birth of the industrial age. It's as vile now as it was then.
I didn't even mention anything about the population growing in the future (which it will though, as Africa is still going through its demographic transition), I was talking about the present day population vs. where it was in the past, specifically the year 1800. (Though the point goes for 1950 too, where the world population was only 2,5 billion.)

It is really quite amazing how a post about the possible future challenges the working class might have to contend with in the face of increased automation, somehow gets turned into a racist argument in your head though.

Tiny Brontosaurus posted:

And I can't fully express how repugnant I find it that you assume a person who has food and shelter will drop out of society and civic engagement.
Where are you even getting this from?

Freakazoid_ posted:

College has a way of educating about more than just the job you're after. College educated voters lean left for a reason. Getting more americans into higher education is going to shift politics so that leftist ideas become a little more realistic.

This idea that the rich can disengage itself from the working class sounds far too fantastical to be practical, because that means they need full control of both federal and state governments. It's also impractical to believe they can disengage from all job types, as the people making the machines are still human. Humans who have a college education, by the way.
You say that like a powerful state is a certainty. No one is going to care about having full control of both "federal and state governments", if the state doesn't have the power to tell corporations what to do. Doesn't matter if people "vote left", if corporations just tell the government to gently caress off.

As for the latter point, are you sure? I'm not saying it will happen right now, but can you honestly say that machines will never be designed by machines, leaving humans out of the loop? Even if a few people do remain in the loop, that could still leave 99% of the population out of the high-tech economy, which is essentially the same scenario as only the super rich being part of it for the majority of the world, unless the majority of that 1% decide to do everyone else a solid by betraying their bosses and creating means of production that directly work to serve the public.

A Buttery Pastry
Sep 4, 2011

Delicious and Informative!
:3:

Main Paineframe posted:

Why don't corporations tell the government to gently caress off now, and what do you expect to change that?
Well, at the moment they just tell them "No" when governments are planning something they really don't like, and then the government backs down or waters down whatever it was that they were doing. Not that it always works, but then the state still has a lot of power, and the people are still needed for the economy to function. As the world shifts into a more automated state, the balance of power will shift toward the people who control production, now much less dependent on the good will of human workers for their profits - and better able to shop around for a nice place to set up shop.

A Buttery Pastry
Sep 4, 2011

Delicious and Informative!
:3:

Paradoxish posted:

Are we talking about an extreme dystopia where 90% of the population is unemployed or something more realistic like a few percent decline in labor force participation per decade? I
Is that the more realistic one? Recent studies in Denmark predict a job loss of around 700.000-1.000.000 over the next two decades, or somewhere around 25-35% of the labor force. A Swedish study arrives at similar conclusions for Sweden, as do I think one done for Canada. Incidentally, in relation to the gender politics mentioned in the thread, the majority of the job losses in Denmark are predicted to happen in male-dominated industries, and I would be surprised if that was not also the case or Sweden and Canada.

A Buttery Pastry
Sep 4, 2011

Delicious and Informative!
:3:

Paradoxish posted:

Job loss doesn't necessarily translate directly into unemployment or loss of labor force participation. The US loses an absurdly huge number of jobs every year, but we generate an absurdly huge number too. A million jobs lost over two decades is the kind of thing you'd probably notice if looking at long-term unemployment or labor force statistics, but I doubt that Danish employment is going to go off of a cliff unless job growth halts completely.
That's a ton of new jobs that will have to be created. Translated into American numbers, its the equivalent of 40-56 million jobs lost. US manufacturing has lost what, 5 million jobs since 2000?

Anyone have solid statistics on jobs created and jobs lost, as opposed to net job growth/loss? The current rate of jobs being automated away or otherwise becoming obsolete is pretty important to judging the impact of expected future job losses.

A Buttery Pastry
Sep 4, 2011

Delicious and Informative!
:3:

Brainiac Five posted:

Use the fertility rates instead, Dead Reckoning is being a little sneak to defend his genocidal ideas.

http://apps.who.int/gho/data/node.main.110?lang=en

Fertility rate in the US is at about 2, which is exactly replacement rate before you consider child and teenage mortality. So just slightly sub-replacement, along with the UK. The average for World Bank high-income countries is 1.8, well below replacement. Upper-middle income countries are at 2.0, exactly replacement.
Since replacement rate by definition takes into account mortality in pre-childbearing years, 2.0 can't be "exactly replacement" unless you basically make children invulnerable/immortal. Your overall point is true, just nitpicking your wording. That said, since replacement rates range from 2.1 to 3.4 depending on the country, that 0.2 lead for upper-middle income over high-income countries in terms of births might get eaten up by higher morality rates. Which just further reinforces the point that (natural) population growth is starting to become a finished chapter in most of the world, with Africa being the big exception for the 21st century.

A Buttery Pastry
Sep 4, 2011

Delicious and Informative!
:3:

Taffer posted:

This is not about climate change or scarce resources. Those are extremely important areas that humanity needs to put a ton of resources into, but they're tangential to automation. Automation can be applied to them in a variety of ways but mostly its just used for efficiency. It's cheaper, faster, and more reliable to automate tasks instead of hiring humans to do it. That's why we automate.
That said, climate change does go pretty well with the "Well, we don't really need those people anymore" attitude that automation will engender.

Taffer posted:

You seem to be seriously depressed about climate change and resource scarcity. There are other threads for that.
Maybe I'm mixing him up with someone else, but I think it's the same dude who uses the climate change thread as a personal E/N thread. In which case, the "other threads for that" should really be in E/N.

A Buttery Pastry
Sep 4, 2011

Delicious and Informative!
:3:

Main Paineframe posted:

Can't we? Most of our resource problems are issues of allocation and distribution, not availability.
At developed world levels? I know famine and poo poo is just a question of distribution, but what if everyone is trying to get say, a German lifestyle? In any case, what is true today in this regard might not be true in a few decades, given the challenges associated with climate change and the possible shift in resource use that might force.

A Buttery Pastry
Sep 4, 2011

Delicious and Informative!
:3:

Owlofcreamcheese posted:

If I heard some baker found out a new trick to bake a cake in 1 hour instead of 2I'd think about how big that business would be. Not that it would be the end of it for most of the staff.
Think of it not as a single bakery, but the cake-making industry as a whole. If one bakery gains a serious competitive edge due to lower labor requirements, it's going to take over a greater and greater market share - a market share that used to be serviced by less labor-efficient bakeries. That results in the number of jobs in the industry contracting, even if the specific bakery that knows "one weird trick" expands its labor force.

A Buttery Pastry
Sep 4, 2011

Delicious and Informative!
:3:

Owlofcreamcheese posted:

I never get being really freaked out about HACKERS and smart devices. Like I guess it's bound to happen but we already have computers and cell phones and hundreds of apps and websites and I never get why one more becomes the bridge too far. Like I guess someone might hack my bluetooth connected toaster and I'd rather they not but I'm not sure why that is supposed to be any more scary than them hacking the pizza ordering app I have on my cell phone, let alone hacking my online bank account or something.

Like someone hacking my lights would be mildly annoying but it doesn't even seem like it'd be in the top ten percent of inconvenience of things a person could hack. Like I don't get why I am supposed to be all pearl clutching about fear of scary hackers at this and not everything else? It feels like someone warning me I shouldn't buy a clock because someone could break into my house and steal it. Like, that is true, someone could, they aren't wrong, people have stolen clocks out of people's houses, but it's not even in the top ten things someone could break into my house to steal, and I already own things that could be stolen so a clock is just one more thing on a list that already includes "everything".
You'll change your tone when you come home to a refrigerator that was turned off by hackers, then go to the store and see empty shelves because it happened to everyone in the country.

A Buttery Pastry
Sep 4, 2011

Delicious and Informative!
:3:

Owlofcreamcheese posted:

Like I guess that would be a medium amount of inconvenient?
Death from starvation is not simply an inconvenience.

A Buttery Pastry
Sep 4, 2011

Delicious and Informative!
:3:
Not saying bank security is necessarily as good as it should be, but I've read stuff about how a lot of these IoT devices have basically no security at all, which might warrant some concern? Like, could an easily hackable refrigerator be a backdoor into more sensitive stuff, if all your poo poo was part of some integrated network?

A Buttery Pastry
Sep 4, 2011

Delicious and Informative!
:3:

Owlofcreamcheese posted:

I agree it'd be bad if iot devices are extremely poorly programmed but again I'm not exactly clear why I'm supposed to hold this fear specifically about this compared to anything else?
The issue is that IoT poo poo might be especially poorly secured.

A Buttery Pastry
Sep 4, 2011

Delicious and Informative!
:3:
I imagine eventually they might just be the only thing being made, because that's what the vast majority of people want, adding the technology is cheap, and no one wants the old school stuff filling up warehouses.

A Buttery Pastry
Sep 4, 2011

Delicious and Informative!
:3:

Owlofcreamcheese posted:

Yeah, the whole premise of the doom and gloom sci-fi story makes no sense, Like everyone is unemployeed because systems, computers and robots took their job and do them for less than minimum wage but somehow there is still rich people that get money by selling the products to ???? and all the poor people are deprived despite living in a world were nearly all tasks can be done by systems, computers and robots for less than minimum wage.
Your rejection of the idea is based on the premise that mass consumer economies are a given, when there's no reason to believe that to be the case. It hasn't been historically, and isn't even in every economy today.

A Buttery Pastry
Sep 4, 2011

Delicious and Informative!
:3:

Guavanaut posted:

Feudalism is when they own the people as well as the land and the property. When they only own the latter two it's rentier capitalism.
Feudalism doesn't require you to own the people who inhabit the land. At its simplest form you just own the right to administrate the land, which you can then divide up and rent out to peasants so you don't have to actually work it yourself. Though obviously the fact that this makes your landlord your boss, gives them quite a lot of say over your life. And in a state were serfdom is a thing, you're of course not allowed to leave the land, preventing the peasantry from even exercising the small amount of power they had at points to choose their lord. (As seen after the Black Death, where a sudden reduction in the labor supply gave the remaining peasants a much needed boost to their bargaining power.)

Though really, that's not that relevant to a robot future. Feudal lords made arrangements with the peasantry because they needed their labor, but if the cheapest labor is now a robot then the peasantry (or their modern equivalent) serves no purpose.

A Buttery Pastry
Sep 4, 2011

Delicious and Informative!
:3:

Owlofcreamcheese posted:

Okay, so why can't the poor people chip in to buy their own everything factory?
Chip in with what? Working people didn't buy out capitalists back when they made decent wages, and in this scenario they'll live at a subsistence level at best. It's also not in the interest of the wealthy to share that factory, as it will increase the competition for the resources required to build everything.

A Buttery Pastry
Sep 4, 2011

Delicious and Informative!
:3:

Owlofcreamcheese posted:

It just seems overly contrived to imagine a world where nearly any job can be done by a machine that costs less than 15,080 a year to own and run but also all these services they provide can be controlled by some evil ultra rich class that could never be undercut by the fact anyone can own a machine. And that with no one working that the rich people that own all the services and manufacturing robots are somehow still getting rich selling these things to ?????
How would "anyone" get their hands on these machines? Who is selling them, and why? I mean, they could be keeping them for themselves and selling whatever they make, which would only stop being a decent business plan when the people they're selling to definitely won't be able to afford one of these machines. Also, what does "less than 15,080 a year to own and run" even mean to you? Any kind of expense can become quite the obstacle if you don't have an income.

As for your second point, we're talking about a post-consumer society, if they're selling things it's to other people owning other kinds of automated machinery with access to resources they do not possess themselves. We're literally talking about the economy splitting apart, one part growing more and more automated while the other becomes home to redundant people. It's not just our present society but with more robots, it's a complete replacement of one system for another (or two others).

A Buttery Pastry
Sep 4, 2011

Delicious and Informative!
:3:

ElCondemn posted:

Even though computers can produce solutions we didn't think of you have a problem with the "model"? I'm not really sure what you are trying to say, it seems like you think computers are inferior to humans because we created them?
Man can't create an ensouled being, only God.

A Buttery Pastry
Sep 4, 2011

Delicious and Informative!
:3:

Paradoxish posted:

There's also this, which is something that doesn't get brought up all that much when people start pearl clutching over robots taking our jerbs:

A lot of times we automate stuff because the robots are actually better at it than we are.
That doesn't really address the main concern though, which is that the people who get replaced get told to just go (s)kill themselves. Greater efficiency is on the surface a good thing, but society dictates whether it actually is.

A Buttery Pastry
Sep 4, 2011

Delicious and Informative!
:3:

BrandorKP posted:

Times has its version of the tesla article up, this is the part that matters:

If true that's a bfd.
Seems like an even bigger deal in Europe, where cargo trucks move about 46% of freight compared to 30% in the US. Actually, I wonder how it shakes out given different fuel/electricity prices in other countries - the US has famously low gas prices, for its wealth, but US electricity prices are actually even lower relative to the prices in many European countries.

A Buttery Pastry
Sep 4, 2011

Delicious and Informative!
:3:

Owlofcreamcheese posted:

One of the resident evil games gets easier if you are bad but hides that that system exists from the player so you don't feel bad
Don't the more action-oriented titles in general just attempt to support how you choose to play, giving you more ammo for your preferred weapons, stuff like that? Of course the inverse of this is MGSV, which counters your play style by giving enemies equipment that undermine your preferred strategies. I could definitely see that kind of stuff become more common, procedurally creating/modifying your game experience, in a more thorough manner, depending on your play style.

A Buttery Pastry
Sep 4, 2011

Delicious and Informative!
:3:

Doc Hawkins posted:

Some fella wrote a whole bunch of words (and also I think a thesis?) about how you could make much more interesting procedurally generated worlds, and is making a game to show what he means. Cultures, complete with architectural styles, clothing styles, modes of address...and that's just one guy working with ASCII graphics. Imagine the man-hours of work that currently go into placing every house and tree in an open world game instead going into a bunch of shufflable styles and variables.
I can definitely see some potential here, though I'm definitely of the "I care about what's happening in-game, not background lore"-type though, so I'm mostly interested in this from the perspective of how it affects the play experience. Obviously the visual aspects matter here too, and can even inform the player of what kind of society they're interacting with, but a lot of what he's talking about seems to be essentially setup for a experience rather than the experience itself.

A contrast to this would be a Paradox series he doesn't talk about, namely Crusader Kings. There you have 10-20 thousand AI characters, with traits ranging from the common to the very rare, interacting with each other, creating emergent story lines in their interaction with the player and each other. I don't see any reason why such a system couldn't also be used in for example an RPG, moving the game away from custom made quests to ones that are procedurally generated according to the goals of the AI agents. Like, if an AI agent is basically a CK2 duke who wants to assassinate his rival, perhaps the player could then be tasked with actually carrying out the plot? Depending on how well the player performs, or the AI's plans, perhaps a war would be the next step, and suddenly the player is involved in a massively dramatic development which no developer has pre-defined. The question here basically becomes how far down the hierarchy you go in terms of having NPC's exist on the AI agent level - maybe some of them are high level versions (kings/politicians/bishops/rebel leaders and what have you) and others more low level with simpler scopes (small time gangsters and raiders)

Actually, the CK2 approach almost seems mandatory if you auto-generate the world. At least, I have a hard time imagining pre-written story for a world that has not been generated. The cultural/political/religious layer the dude is talking about would also work really well with the emergent gameplay idea, as long as you add personality traits to the AI agents that can bounce off of those layers - like having a zealous xenophobe AI that weighs loving up culturally/religiously distinct AI's really highly, the greater the difference the more eager it is to assassinate, imprison, or start wars. Would also be hilarious if it resulted in as varied outcomes as you see in CK2. Like, one time you help a duke and rescue his wife, and you gain a friend for life and a safe haven from the people who aren't big fans of you. With different (hidden) personality traits, he eats his wife, sacrifices his first born to auto-generated Satan, starts a hell-war with all his neighbors and proceeds to proclaims you his most trusted and favored advisor.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

A Buttery Pastry
Sep 4, 2011

Delicious and Informative!
:3:

LLSix posted:

My state governor appears to care about crop pickers because they're so important to the state economy.
Important for the businesses he cares about, or important because of the money they spend? Gonna lead to pretty different responses to automatoes.

  • Locked thread