Well, I note that you speccify that the AI is “deluded.”
Without getting into a lot of technicalities, it seems to me that the sense of “the same” that I care about is the one in which, when I lay down to sleep last night and did so, and when I woke up this morning, those two consciousnesses were “the same,” that is, earlier and later stages in a continuing process over time; that is, I could go to sleep and it would not be annihilation. Whether uploading is survival or not depends on whether I believe when I lie down in the upload machine, I will wake up again in the cybershell (if you’ll forgive my using the GURPS term). Saying anything more than that would get us into the thread that (unlike you and me) cannot die. . . .
So what say C has a bunch of domestic robots such as a dishwasher and a roomba, and an AI cossistant that can give her better advice than a human, while needing 1.4% of the cognitive capacity (not needing the ability to play basketball badly, misremember quotations, and goof off when it is supposed to be studying Greek)?
What is the robot Bill doing? Is is running the game while you drudge at editorial work to pay its electricity bill, or are you running the game while it earns the income, and what happens when meat Bill dies?
I’m not sure of your net worth, but a small percentage of my net worth would be perhaps a couple lakh dollars. My brain contains more than a hundred billion neurons and maybe two trillion synapses. Unless we can map and duplicate 100,000,000 synapses for a cent I am not going going to be trivially tossing off a duplicate me who would feel fully entitled to half of the balance remaining of my worth, and expect me to do the work while it did the goofing off.
A lot of what I had to say, as with the discussion of practical tasks, seems properly to be describable as not having thought the matter through. If the computational capacity to simulate me were that cheap, the computational capacity to handle domestic and administrative tasks would be comparably cheap.
Where games are concerned, what I really want is a surrogate to continue my campaign in memory of me after I’m gone, as a gift to my players. I’m not looking to have it do anything while I’m still alive to run my own games. Of course you could say that destructive uploading could grant the same benefit, but having to die earlier to get the posthumous double raises its cost considerably.
You inspire me with the thought of a rich high tech colony having a funerary obsession, dotted with tombs, where the equivalents of the pharoahs of the IV Dynasty built not artificial hills but immortal simulacra of their minds.
A thing that I suppose I ought to describe is the vademecum, a gadget not wildly different from a modern smart-phone, but with such memory and processing power that people use them to run adaptive LAI assistants that are with them most of their lives.
The reason I think that this is unanswerable is that, as far as the new copy is concerned, it remembers being me-in-the-old-body, and can pass all the tests of continuity that one might expect to try. The old version (assuming non-destructive copy) also remembers being me. This kind of unresolvable problem is to me a sign that one’s using the wrong philosophical tools for the job.
That just says that John Locke was wrong to make memory the criterion of personal identity. Certainly this is a case of using the wrong tools for the job, but it’s a failing that is characteristic of all the British empiricists, and of the logical positivists and many of the analytic philosophers who followed them.
Before writing anything about what technology exists, work out what question you’re trying to answer, i.e. what the players will want and need to know. Two questions spring to mind:
What can the technology do for me? What can technology in others’ hands do to me? What do you mean I’ve used up all my questions?
What feel do I get from the technology?
The first one is crucial because a player entering an SF story really has no idea what the technology can and can’t do. There’s little lamer than having been defeated in the first mission and having your boss say, why didn’t you deploy the drones shown on page 916 of the sourcebook? FOSU (fear of screwing up) can make players overly cautious and hesitant.
Obvious questions:
Will the police be able to track all my movements through the streets using CCTV & bugs & DNA sniffing and AI. Will ordinary people, just because everyone has sensors and enough are publishing what they see on the internet for anyone to read. cf. Person of Interest.
Are there robots. Are they more or less capable than humans, in each of various ways. What about augmented humans.
Can people read my mind, by looking at my brain waves or facial expressions or whatever, if they capture me. Can they do it if they just see me walking down the street.
Do people get old. How old might people be?
Are there any threats the people live with that we don’t have in the C21, the way nukes didn’t exist in the C19, or wheel-locks made the assassin’s job easier.
Lots of nanotech-related questions.
Lots of questions that would come to me if it weren’t 1 AM.
By the time the players have finished the technology brief they should know the answer to these questions. And the answers should be the ones that make for a fun planetary romance.
The second one is more subtle. It’s related to asking yourself what a European of the C19 would think if they found themselves in our society and had to learn to cope with modern technology. Would they come to any broad conclusions about how this technology affected life, independent of cultural choices. It’s hard to do but important for the player’s inner world.
Between (guess) 3500 BC and (about) 1900 AD the fastest way to get around on flat ground or roads was a horse. By the 1970s or so we had turbofan airliners. This was an astonishing revolution in transport. Barely overlapping with this was the revolution in information technology which started around 1950 and is ongoing. Most science fiction writers up until the 1980s knew about the first but not the second: they grossly overestimated future advances in transport, while grossly underestimating advances in information technology. Flat Black is to a large extent a descendant of this tradition, and doesn’t work with realistic advances in information technology, indeed in many technologies. This means it probably has to let go of its wish to be a realistic projection of future technology. Embrace your retroness.
Another way of looking at this, or at least an aspect of it:
Identify some categories of situations:
A fire fight in a dark alley.
CSI-ing a crime scene.
Interviewing a suspect
Finding the crashed aircraft in the jungle
Negotiating a price for a purchase
etc.
For each situation the players should know how things have changed relative to what they might be expecting from real life and mimetic fiction.
So for the fire fight, we need to know that
Instead of revolvers we use meson pistols, they work basically the same, but cover is no longer effective except visual cover still works.
First aid can save you from almost anything as long as the spinal column and brain survived.
Gluon armour is quite effective and comes in three colours, if you can figure out what colour armour your opponent has you have an advantage.
For some problems the answer might be “This is a solved problem and human input is not required.” As long as that’s not the answer for all problems, that’s fine. Nobody expects humans to carry things across counties on their backs, for instance, as they might in a fantasy setting.
Anyway, the moral is think of the question before the answer.
I do see your point, but I’d like to qualify that for me to embrace my retroness would not be the same as flaunting my retroness. Star Trek, for example, gets away with a pretence of being the future that Star Wars does not make, and Star Trek depends in certain important ways on being set in the future. If Flat Black were set in an explicitly alternative future with explicitly different physical laws, or even in an alternative future in a timeline that diverged in 1959, I think that that would spoil it. Perhaps I ought to junk it and start again with something else.
Connie Willis wrote time travel books in which the people in the future don’t have mobile phones. The first of these was written in 1992, so fair enough up to a point though the writing was definitely on the wall. But she felt she was stuck with it, so in a later book A preparing for a time-trip has a mobile phone, B is terribly worried, and A says “don’t worry, it’s only a dummy”. I don’t believe she’s ever explained the root cause of this (and frankly after Blackout/All Clear I’m probably never going to read a book of hers again) but little tweaks like that can help sustain an otherwise untenable setup.
Future historians time-travel to London during the Blitz. An American writes England, and claims to have done her research. A great fat book that builds up to nothing at all. Not the best book I read last year.
In Space Cadet, published 1948, Matt Dodson gets a call while standing in line outside the Space Patrol testing office. His friend-to-be Bill Jarman comments on having packed his own phone away to avoid getting his family’s calls. So RAH had not only a technological device of the future but a social stratagem for avoiding its inconvenient implications. . . .
Well, don’t junk it. But the marginal value of setting it aside and doing something new is likely to be greater than the marginal value of yet another revision of Flat Black. So yes, I’d encourage doing something new and if you want input I’m sure plenty of people here would be interested in providing some.