Cyberpunk Yourself
Cyberpunk Yourself Final Project
Four Autobiographical Lists
authorities daily deal with: professors, school security guards, bus drivers, cafeteria supervisors,
technology use: laptop, phone, ipad, charger, TV,
things you do with technology: doing school work, write essay, coding, 3D modeling, graphic designing, watch movie/shows, listen to music, play games, chat with friends, voice chat, screen share, online play games,
online subcultures: game parties, school groups, certain game forums, video group clubs,
Four Fictional Things
TV and video gaming: people are inside an immersive world by just plugging in the chip after their head. they stay idle in real life but the mind comes to the fictional world with games, shows, and all kinds of interactive experiences (considering Ready Player One, SAO Online)
Chat with friends: the microchip inside your brain is not only going to read your thought about what you are going to say to your friends, instead but the bridge is also being built from brain to brain: people do not need to speak, make the gesture or anything, they just read in mind about the chat they are going to tell their friends and then the microchip in their friend's mind will receive the signal and complete such thought transformation.
however, with the technology being raised by the company named ALSET, the company can gain full access to every communication happing around the world and therefore understand what everyone is thinking. more badly, because the microchip inside people’s minds can give information to the brain in some means, they can use such microchips to manipulate people’s actions, though, and everything else. They are about to form an army with these “dolls” they created but luckily, there is still not everyone has such a transmission system, and also some people who refuse to update the software was still uninfected.
Bus drivers: there will not be any bus drivers in the dream world, bus will be considered obsolete transportation methods that should be abandoned in the museum. instead, bus drivers turned out to be transfer managers a person is going to be dissembled into particles with structured information and then use the portal from that place to “print” you out. the structure of every element remains the same so it should be the real person as you being destroyed. however, there will be a constant debate about whether this is an ethical behavior because if there is an exact same duplicate of yourself, will you consider being the exact same person with every personality and traits, or just like the rotten banana in Stein’s Gate. However, although there has been a constant debate about these things, it is indeed the fastest and cheapest transportation method that people interact with every day.
professors: because the microchip implant can help people quickly get knowledge without having to go to classes painfully, the organization of professors is standing out to regulate such knowledge use: people in the world are going to be stratified by social rank and income. only people with high income can get the demanded knowledge while the people with a low payment or people with low social rank will not be capable to interact with so advanced knowledge, but rather simple math to trade and exchange. the highest knowledge league is the organization that controls the “Matrix”, which is a fast-running machine that expands the edge of the sciences. with the high speed of running processes and large demand for input knowledge, the machine’s “brain” can run millions of times faster than the group of scientists and professors. so the expansion of human knowledge largely relies on the running of these machines and people are somehow woking for maintaining such giant computers. however, still, some people refuse to “be led by computers” so they form the against force called “Manpower” that aims to bring back the dominance of human existence. but regarding the huge benefit of the Matrix, governments and authorities refuse to adopt their thoughts and classified them as terrorists. there had been a constant battle between the Matrix party and the Manpower party for several decades.
Make a Protagonist
in this cyberpunk world, I am the normal worker that works for the transportation (teleport) station and my job is to ensure everyone is using it correctly (that no one wants an arm less from New York to Boston). I am not in the lowest social rank or the highest but I can watch people travel, and discuss in the station from a diversity of classes. there is something that can talk about society, work, politics, and technology about this mundane but functioning world with my own perspectives.
The Story
this is still going to be a typical day as normal life goes on. it has been for decades since ALSET introduced the first microchip implant and this year turned out to be another new update released. however, since the incident of mind control presented by that company, people with the implants turned out to be controlled by the company and there has been no one adopted that microchip anymore; has passed several years, and now the company’s force is enough to form a won country. maybe it will still be a matter of time before the region of ALSET will be recognized by the united nations, which is still some blank check that the power is currently controlled by these mega companies rather than the symbolically united nations.
the world also had changed a lot since the decades of the reader in front of the screen, which I believe was around the 2020s. it was quite nostalgic about there are still a variety of about 300 countries with diverse cultures, people, and natural beauties. however, nowadays, nearly 2 out of 3 countries were being dominated by other countries, forces, or large companies: don’t be quite shocked by the company here, instead, most of the companies are much more powerful than some country regions. Although there are still some self-governed countries like Norway or Greenland, as maybe they are further apart from the world and some companies do not like such places, most of the governments are still manipulated by the enterprise behind the representatives. take an example, in your age, that image Biden is just a spokesperson for Tesla, and every note and assignment he interacts, signs, or releases are all followed by the mean of the guy with Tesla, which I remember was Musk. what will America be? people will only become more stratified and lower-ranked workers and non-jobed people are being abandoned by the government while the machine can do these things more powerfully and restlessly. I believe for the next conference Mr. Martin, our president is going to speak about minimizing the population and leaving only “social elites” and those iron and steel friends.
what about me? well, just some random people from not the worst class that is going to be “cleaned” tomorrow, nor some powerful people that can interact with those high-standard bits of knowledge. ah, you ask about what “knowledge” mean here? well, there is always some high-tech stuff in your science fiction novels about some human-computer interacting interfaces, or machine-human brains, or just some random implants in your head that can increase your strength, power, wellness, or intelligence, like the plot in Cyberpunk: Edge Runners when that guy punched Pilar against several blocks. those things are something we have in our head right now but don’t be panic, there is not only one manufacturer now while AlSET is just one company that doing some bad things to their users. however, there are other publishers like Microsoft (yeah, the Microsoft you remembered, that company had lasted for several decades till now), Genetechs, Greenspaces, and so on. just like competitors between Intel, AMD, and Nivida, these companies are competing with each other for users to adopt their services while normal people can only do the operation one time in their lifetime: which means if you chose Microsoft when you were born, you have to use the Microsoft services for the rest of your life.
however, although the service providers are different, the bits of knowledge are remaining the same: the mainframe of the knowledge is currently controlled by the World Academics Organization (a.k.a WAO). they are in charge of distributing, researching, and manipulating the current knowledge base and determining who can access which knowledge. they are doing this by so-called maintaining the social stability that not all people need to learn differential equations to understand you spent 50 cents more when you were buying broccoli in the supermarket, instead, they give the demanded knowledge to the people who need them based on the occupation, social status, and even income and places where you live. people working for higher technology companies are worth more knowledge than some people living in a poor area, while the baby born from prestigious families can gain much more Tins of knowledge than those babies who are born poor. and yes, they are measuring the amount of knowledge with the unit of tin - in remembering the last ever scientist in the Science Era, Mr. Nathan Tin. his death also indicated the starting era of the Silicon Era, in which people deployed “The Matrix” - the largest computing power ever for exploring the edges of current research, science, and technology.
the Matrix that deals with human knowledge and performs millions of calculations outnumbered human brains in the different index
sources: https://huggingface.co/spaces/stabilityai/stable-diffusion
you are asking about where those researchers go? well let me finish first: people are making the computing power from human researchers to the Matrix while with the development of computing power ever since then, the term which you guys called “singularity” was achieved on Mar. 22nd, 2056, when the computing power of the machine “Slik Road XIV” is the first time exceeding human brain’s computing power and from that decades, artificial cognition, not as what you guys paper about artificial intelligence which just let them draw anime girls and R-18 pictures, had been prompted and machines are gradually becoming aware of “themselves” rather than considering themselves as good helpers of human kinds. those researchers, instead of writing papers and PUAing Ph.D. students, are just verifying the status of the Matrix, determining the pathways of the knowledge, and maintaining that they are actually the highest tier of the accumulative knowledge pyramid that no one else is using for forbidden knowledge.
and yes I agree, these people are just selfish guys that not doing their work and oppressing other people with lower classes without any ethical concerns. however, as you may see from the current scenarios, the government is allowing such things and the microchip companies are just listening to the distribution of the knowledge and giving them directly to those people’s minds. the fast transfer of knowledge makes such a thing possible while some calculus stuffs we had to learn for a whole semester now just something like downloading an application from the apple store, and the outcome seemed perfect, even better than the students who got an A+ in those classes. you may understand what that means to the social systems: no schools, no classes, no professors or papers, nothing to be fearful of when you were still a kid; however, your children may receive knowledge from everywhere from up to the sky to the bedrock under your feet, which are something you may never understand even though you are 30 years older than your son. on one hand, the government will not let that happen to maintain the social strata and stability which may not be capable to handle such a massive hurricane of knowledge, on the other hand, the computing power from the Matrix is so much that on day of operating such Matrix will be the same Tins of accumulative knowledge that humanity has ever discovered before the 2020s. then that may make some sense that the world now does not need that much population while most of the machines can do what a normal worker can do, and they are way less unstable, more powerful, and cheaper than such a normal worker.
I am just a normal worker working at the transportation department we are in charge of maintaining the people’s travel flow and making sure people are getting to their destination correctly and completely. as you may see, people here are transporting from station to station - a person is recorded in the machine located in New York and being dissembled into particles and shoot them to the destination station in Seatle. people used to take airplanes and trains from one place is always dangerous and spending too much time; however, the statistics said that as people are adopting such technology, the risk of being injured or dead because of transportation become largely decreased: while the person is transferred from the beam of metadata, it is always safe and fast travel from one place to another just like transfer your zipped document from your computer to your disk - no one is worrying about if the zip file will be corrupted or the transfer is incomplete (and also, there are always backups) or maybe causing the fire on your computer. however, this job is such a nice and easy job that there have been several years since our station is operating just as fine and no accidents occurred.
what a teleport platform looks like
but people are always concerned about ethical issues, questions like if there is a perfect duplication of yourself, will that person be “you” or they are someone else? if I duplicated a person and killed that original person, will I commit murder? will the new people continue the same status as that original person? so some people out there organized a league against computer power and advocated back to human rights - which they called themselves as Manpower Party. not only are they will against the transportation system that is operating now because of those dilemmas I have just talked about, but also about the World Academic Organization that monopolized the world’s knowledge and stratified the people on their social status. obviously, these people mostly come from the lower classes that may be “wiped out” tomorrow, and I may kind of empathize with them quite often that people are just living to survive in this society. however, the development of technology does not argue with you about what human rights and ethical concerns are, they are just giant machine that runs faster and faster I believe maybe one day those machines will outpower human power and become the true era of the Silicon Age.
you see there, some people may be the first time using such services, which may not be quite often these days. parts of my job are to illustrate how these transportation portals work with this manual and convince them about they are effective, safe, and more powerful. these individual cells are just transmission portals that they will activate when someone is inside and set the destination station - as for every encoder, there should be a decoder. It should be my busiest time of the day between the morning when everyone goes to work, and the evening when everyone back from work, as normal people may think. but as you see, people can come from a whole different region than here - some people here may come from South Africa, or Asia, which have a totally different time zone than here, which leads to an interesting scenario that the station is full of people no matter what time of the day. sometimes when the cells are not enough for transportation with such a massive crowd, some people are renavigated to the nearest station by the side, which I believe there should be one in Manhattan, while you can see here has a big cache area for queueing of using the cell: human metadata can be stored here for a bit of time but not as long as you may think. the particles will maintain their status no matter how much time elapsed but still, but some parts are still radioactive and volatile: the longer they are stored in the cache area, the higher risk the reformation process will have some error to have a failure build. I have once interacted with such an incident before where the transformation went well but the human body was being built as a failure: it was such a nasty scene like a human body blasted from the inside. however, the officials came here and collected the data saved temporarily in the server and reprinted the body based on the organic materials based on the saved data. the human was later being “retrieved” and he even did not notice a thing: the only confusion he had was why the transportation process took such a long time that he failed to go to work on time. he even argued with me about such poor service that I can still remember today, I mean, do you understand that the person was still a chunk of material at the last minute and he or “it” is talking with you right now.
for lunchtime, people are not usually taking the same hamburger, french fries, or salads as you guys may take. instead, the expansion of the industries and continuous conflicts had led agriculture to be worse than before: although people invented synthetic planting methods and increased the number of plants to be grown without fertilizer, soil, sunlight, and even water, such human transformations also led to the broken structure of genes of these plants. people can hardly get the energy they needed from these plants so these dishes were day after day farther away from us, I mean, I quite missed the taste of the french fries with ketchup, or the chicken nuggets with sauces, although I hated them so much when I was in the university. with the help of these chips and movement assist systems, people are not consuming much energy as before quite drastically - people only need to consume one meal each day but in return, people need to charge a lot of devices on their bodies, such as the chip, which eats up a bunch of the energy while running its 160 core processors; but nano injections that enhances your kinetics movement, aided ankle conjunctions that help you to jump higher, and many other things are all going to be charged in the same protocol: so you may see, we are transforming from carbon-based creatures to silicon-based creatures, but that’s how the world rotates, only those people who paid a lot can get a taste of the original natural meal that you may have seemed common with several bucks. but as normal workers here, our job meals are just some energy bar that tastes really bad, but at least it can give me desired energy to push me to finish my whole day’s work. I can purchase maybe a jar of coke or sprite to revigorate my dead taste, but that does not happen quite often to me though.
well, for things after work, people here are just being quite desperate about the real world and devoting a lot of effort to the virtual world, the virtual world is not as you may think about your VR glasses and immersive reality, but the actual second life of the people in real life. people can do almost everything in such a world including work, exercise, talk, and play games. while I have a job here that goes from early in the morning to quite a late afternoon, so I may not be the person who is so obsessed with the virtual world as some people I know: they are just living potentially every day in a such virtual world and get paid for jobs, indulge in some *physical pleasure* or just want to achieve some neural excitement - like what is the feeling of jumping off from the Himalayas or about to being shot by the bullet, as there is no potential “death” in the virtual world but the microchips implant will stimulate the exact same feeling of these activities and help you to achieve what so-called “imaginary climax”. I am not that kind of person but those experiences look really temptations to me that I may want to try one day; however, the most things I interact with the virtual world may be playing some shooting games with my friends, or dancing with some girls in the night club: most of the bars with real girl performers were quite expensive that I could not afford; however, there are way cheaper bars that let AI girls on the stage, which no one can tell the difference but it is maybe just some human nature taught by our genes to interact with a girl and give our gene code to the next potential carrier. you see, things become altered a lot in our daily lives but human nature, which is the source code that lasted millions of years ago, will still remain the same no matter where we are at. but overall, the virtual space is just another virtual mutual space that filled will all people’s passions and desires about this real world, either in a good way or the bad way.
what people are going to be interacting with the virtual world (but the actual processor will be the chip rather than this giant VR headset)
https://huggingface.co/spaces/stabilityai/stable-diffusion
so you are asking about how humans deal with the existence of powerful computers that do not revolt from the human regions. yes, what I have just said is so taunting that computers can calculate something much faster and therefore they can easily revolt from human governance and build their Silicon World, like what Earth looks like in the Matrix (movie); however, the thing happening here is not that kind drastic: there is not such a big conflict between human and machines that we may call the end of the world, instead, people are becoming more machine-like and machine are becoming more human-like - as you can see, both creatures are just transforming the other to adopting each other, just like if we throw some Chinese and some English, we can make Japanese. machines are forming our bodies with more energy-consuming than protein-consuming, whereas machines are evolving to have neural links that mimic how human brains work; however, either approach works yet right now so we can easily tell if someone is a human or a machine. can I say is it bad to have some evolution? or will that takes away the “spirit” of the human being? well, that is some assignment for philosophy students, which we may not have one in this world though. but the world is just rotating, either with me or without me; so most of the people just close their eyes and hang up with an android girl, which gives them more pleasure than thinking about when will the sun rises tomorrow.
well, that’s all I have to say about things for today. if you still have a chance, just taste french fries with ketchup and watch how your fans burn your 3070 Ti Graphics Cards. when the time people can’t distinguish between real life and the virtual world, it's controversial whether it is an advancement or the end of the world, but more choices lead to fewer choices, and what human nature is still human nature.
Work Cites
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberpunk:_Edgerunners
inspirations draw from
Ready Player One
The Three-Body Problem
The Matrix
Oculus VR
Steins Gate
Cyberpunk 2077
Towards Sigulairity
Venaver Bush’s As We May Think
Genshin Impact (particularly some plots after 3.0)
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