Escaped gaming meme: Nanotech Revolution

[mithriltabby]

I wasn’t terribly happy with the available choices in Deus Ex: Invisible War. The endgame comes down to:

1. Kill the leaders of all the conspiratorial factions, creating a power vacuum that will be filled by gods know what ruthless fiends
2. Support the Luddites that want to turn their back on biomodification technology (despite the fact that the djinni has already left the bottle— not exactly a long-term solution)
3. Join the Illuminati and preserve the elitist status quo that murders the competition and treats people like sheep
4. Force all of humanity to undergo nanotech upgrades so their opinions can be sampled by a planetary AI for instant-response democracy and everyone gets free biotech health fixes and upgrades that remove the have/have-not distinction for people who can afford upgrades

Given those choices, I’d pick (4), but only as the least of the available evils; I wouldn’t be comfortable forcing choices on people.

Naturally, I pondered how I would screw up the world if I had access to the nanotechnology available in that game. I’d have my own variation on (4) that allowed people to volunteer.

The first thing people would find would be the seeds, drifting on little parachutes on the wind. Planted, they would grow into various different types of trees that would take care of the basics on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs:

• Cornucopia tree: Fruit would include all manner of regular fruits and vegetables as well as protein collections that mimicked various meats and what would basically be sacks of flour and packets of spices. Whichever items get picked more often grow more often. There would also be reattachable gourds that would fill with water or flavorful beverages when hanging on the tree.
• Clothing tree: would have long, straight limbs that produce different types of fabric, fruit with balls of thread, needles, dyes, etc.
• Housetrees: resembling weeping willows that can be trained to form rooms, with leaves that can join together to form a wall to keep out wind and weather or open up to allow breezes to pass through. Various brightly colored fruits would contain paint that has different effects on a tree: make a limb flexible briefly, convince a section of foliage that it's a wall, door, or window, etc. Housetrees would be able to recognize neighboring housetrees to form into larger dwellings, including multilevel ones.
• Infotrees: the fruit of these trees would vary from wearable computers (much like a pair of glasses with headphones) to information slates to holograph-and-sound display units; each tree would serve as a satellite uplink to the planetary datanet, as a local wireless node, and a massive local information cache for the planetary library.
• Biotrees: these would fruit with anything from universal medical kits to biotech upgrades, which would talk to people and make sure they understood what they were doing before installation. Upgrades would be anything from a basic health maintenance package to the better-than-human advantages available to corporate minions. The information link package would let you choose just how much of your consciousness you want to share, and with whom: anything from “the planetary AI may sample my opinions” to “my mental talents are available to the global consciousness”. (I’m no fan of hive minds, but I think the depiction of the Martian collective in A Miracle of Science shows a good balance between individuality and shared consciousness.

All these trees would produce more seeds that can be spread and planted by people who like them, in whatever quantities are preferred, and programmed not to take over the ecosystem. They would soak up solar energy, CO₂, N₂, and pollutants from the air and anything else it needed from the ground; there wouldn’t be a lot of need for sewer systems with these hungry root systems available.

This is just the sort of thing to severely annoy repressive governments: turn loose a bunch of these seeds upwind of poverty-stricken citizens and let people choose as they wish. Adventurous people might choose more extreme modifications, and like regular pioneers, they could report on their explorations to the more cautious people.

This kind of tech wouldn’t replace technological civilization, but would be enough to take care of basic needs and let people move focus on more interesting challenges.

One thing I’m still pondering is how to deal with the well-armed repressive governments that would want to burn down all these subversive creations. A forest could easily turn against anyone violent, forming fire-resistant foliage to tangle them up and begin digesting all of their nonliving gear, then eventually let them loose again when they’re stark naked and no longer struggling. There might still be a need for some manner of weapons, though, but those weapons should be useful for breaking down power, not building it up. (We don’t want warlordism developing amidst this plenty.) Perhaps fruit full of goo that reduces nonliving matter to its basic components?

Comments

[grandmoffdavid.livejournal.com]

" there wouldn’t be a lot of need for sewer systems with these hungry root systems available."

This statement stuck out at me because of one little problem. People like to congregate. They form towns and cities, and as you can see from even small towns, people start to outnumber the trees. Also, it takes some time for the waste to break down and get into the soil especially in dry climates, as you know if an errant dog ever craps in your yard. You'd still need a sewage system, you just need an easy way to get the nutrients out to the trees. Although, considering that you're talking about plants that grow wearable computers, adapting a pitcher plant to a urinal bush wouldn't be that hard.

[mithriltabby]

Good point. The root systems could link up in a network that would distribute the sewage to more distant plants.