Escaped gaming meme: Equilibrium technology levels

[mithriltabby]

weregamer and tara_knight kindly lent us their X-box and KOTOR and its sequel; obsessivewoman and I had fun playing the games, and they doubled as research for Rise of the Jedi. I’ve been musing on the details of 25,000-year-old galactic civilizations and the way that the galaxy can seem so similar in two different eras separated by four millennia.

We’re used to a world that changes quickly with fast-paced innovation. There’s no incentive to build things to last for centuries when we expect them to be obsolete in ten years. And since the Industrial Revolution, we have narrowly managed to avoid inflicting such grievous injury on ourselves that we would lose a technology entirely.

Galactic civilization is different. The most extreme proponents of accelerated development have been removed from the human-scale stage by natural selection, and the population remaining are the ones who treat transhumanist and extropian ideas with caution. Conservatives have thousands of years of tradition to draw on when rejecting change. And the right kinds of chaos can provide technological setbacks that keep the level of technology oscillating around a mean of blasters, force fields, antigravity, and hyperdrive.

The galaxy is not a peaceful place; when hyperdrive is cheap enough to make interstellar physical commerce practical, it can make warfare practical as well. Part of warfare is destroying the opposition’s manufacturing infrastructure, and that’s no exception in interstellar warfare. Capturing factories and turning them to your own use is ideal, but denying them to the enemy will suffice. And if regular warlords aren’t bad enough, it seems like every few decades, some damnfool Jedi stumbles across a Sith holocron or ancient, Dark Side-infested ruin, dubs himself Darth Something, and starts amassing fleets and laying waste to entire planets just to show he means business.

Plagues are also an issue. We have enough trouble on our own planet keeping ahead of the diseases incubating in six billion people and circulated by our global network of air travel. Imagine the troubles an entire galactic civilization could have with a pandemic! (Spoilers for KOTOR, highlight to read:) One wiped out the Rakatan Infinite Empire, after all.

Another side effect of galactic trade could be excessive interdependence. If trade becomes too efficient, and no one invests in keeping the right kinds of infrastructure in-system, a star system that is cut off from interstellar trade by blockade, piracy, or the natural drift of stars eliminating a crucial hyperspace route might find itself incapable of manufacturing a crucial component of technology. (For instance, repulsorlifts require an exotic gravitational anomaly manufactured near black holes. If your entire civilization runs on antigravity, bad things could happen if you can no longer replace worn-out parts.)

There’s also the natural aversion to truly dangerous technologies. One good example of a grey goo escape or people ripped apart by reprogrammed utility fog could be enough to scare people off research into strong nanotech for centuries, and a scorched-earth policy for eliminating them usually involves putting big mirrors in orbit and turning any potentially infected areas to lava, just to make sure.

Similarly, intelligence enhancement can have scary results. Superintelligent droids could be very dangerous; stories like that of G0-T0 in KOTOR2 are some of the best things that can happen when superhuman intelligence goes awry. A less pleasant possibility could wind up with humans being kept as pets, or forcibly uploaded into a simulation where they would never experience anything bad— precisely as the droids were designed. I’ve crafted a cautionary tale that I hope is sufficiently chilling. The design principle I’m creating for droids is: “Never make a droid that’s smarter than you are. There’s no way you can program it to have reliable behavior.”

Or the short form of all this: advances in technology don’t necessarily bring advances in wisdom.