Reasons for Cyberpunk: Why we Say No to Exoskeletons

[Mr. Mask]

You gotta love cyberpunk, with its mechanical limbs, bleak futuristic cities, the moral question of function versus humanity with people replacing their parts, the ideals of a new stage of society, etc.. ....Then you have exoskeletons.

The same as a prosthetic arm or body, except you wear it. All the benefits of cyber limbs without the deficits. There are even plans for external brain-enhancing microchips and the like. The only innate advantage cybernetics have is reduced bulk, at the price of elaborate and invasive surgery.

Which brings us to the difficult question... how do we get our cyberpunk dystopia when exoskeletons want to ruin the fun?


One idea I had on this light, was something like osteogenesis imperfecta (brittle-bone disease) becoming much more common, so many people are having much of their skeletons reinforced or replaced with cybernetic ones. These people, unfortunately, may end up in heavy debt to corporations who pay for this treatment. Some of these down-trodden citizens may decide to opt for further "enhancement", and seek out military or criminal work as a result of their debts.
Having the spine replaced in particular is important to a cyborg, as you can't have a super-strong arm without a supporting super-strong shoulder and spine.

Another higher-tech idea was to have some kind of nanomachine or archaea that can alter the the bone and muscle make-up of the host. So slowly your limbs become semi-artificial structures with greatly enhanced muscle, skin, and bones. Of course, it'd be questionable if your body could heal or even control such limbs and bones.


Anyone else have ideas for why and how you can create a cyberpunk haven?

[Mastikator]

I can easily see exoskeletons used by people who work in warehouses and docks. They could replace forklifts since they're more agile and require almost no training. Anyone who's job it is to lift heavy stuff could benefit from exoskeletons.

[Octopusapult]

I can easily see exoskeletons used by people who work in warehouses and docks. They could replace forklifts since they're more agile and require almost no training. Anyone who's job it is to lift heavy stuff could benefit from exoskeletons.

I think this is the logic-train that will get you the answer you want.

While mechanical limbs are all good and well, they're pretty much bound exclusively to the people they're built for, while exosuits could be "piloted" like a vehicle in a sense.

[Mr. Mask]

Mm, exactly. Why get your arms hacked off to equip robotic limbs, when you can just buy an exosuit you can ride in, at a cheaper price.

This brings forward the idea of people being forced to equip cybernetics, at which point upgrading them to military-grade ones seems possible. Then they have the slight benefit of lesser bulk. Of course, they won't make you any stronger than the people with exosuits.


One thought for how you could make cyborgs stronger, is if the conversion of bone and muscle I mentioned wasn't really working out for exoskeletons--it's mostly effective for modifying organisms like humans. This'd mean cyborgs would have a distinctive edge over non-cyborgs, like in much of cyberpunk scifi.

[Cazero]

An exoskeleton is more agile than the machines we have nowadays, but it's still less agile than what implants get you.
Implants are faster since they're directly connected to the nervous system while an exoskeleton by definition can't be.
You can't conceal an exoskeleton powerful enough to be a big deal under civilian clothes.
Exoskeleton might cause a new wave of work accidents requiring the replacement of bodyparts.
An good exoskeleton needs to be tailor-made, making it more expensive than implants.

[goto124]

An good exoskeleton needs to be tailor-made, making it more expensive than implants.

Not the other way round?

[5ColouredWalker]

Implants are faster since they're directly connected to the nervous system while an exoskeleton by definition can't be.
An good exoskeleton needs to be tailor-made, making it more expensive than implants.

-That could be too fast though. Also, you could have a head-jack where an exoskeleton can plug into the mind directly, which would give the same benefit at the cost of being unplugable.
-Because implants don't need to be tailor made, and there's no risk of rejection in regards to implants?

Other than those, good points.

[hymer]

Also, you could have a head-jack where an exoskeleton can plug into the mind directly, which would give the same benefit at the cost of being unplugable.

Could be that this causes phantom sensations, even pains after a while. People effectively become addicted to their exoskeleton. They do with cyberlimbs, too, but since they're there all the time, it matters less.

[Florian]

Now why should there be exoskeletons in a cyberpunk setting at all?

[Mastikator]

An exoskeleton is more agile than the machines we have nowadays, but it's still less agile than what implants get you.
Implants are faster since they're directly connected to the nervous system while an exoskeleton by definition can't be.
You can't conceal an exoskeleton powerful enough to be a big deal under civilian clothes.
Exoskeleton might cause a new wave of work accidents requiring the replacement of bodyparts.
An good exoskeleton needs to be tailor-made, making it more expensive than implants.

If you could implant a smart phone into your brain and access it freely, would you?

Because in a few years you'd have a crummy old computer stuck inside you and people around you would be walking around with MUCH better equipment. Not only would it become obsolete it will wear down from use, then you'd have to pay to take it out. Unless you're in some super advanced ghost in the shell-esque world a bionic prosthetic won't be better than the biological option.

Soldiers probably would have some military version of an exoskeleton, one that provides protection and speed more so than lifting power. Though a stealth suit would probably be an even superior option over a military grade exoskeleton. Coupled with some railgun action and a jetpack and you got yourself an OP super soldier. Invisible, flying and can shoot down heavy vehicles.

[Florian]

If you could implant a smart phone into your brain and access it freely, would you?

Because in a few years you'd have a crummy old computer stuck inside you and people around you would be walking around with MUCH better equipment. Not only would it become obsolete it will wear down from use, then you'd have to pay to take it out. Unless you're in some super advanced ghost in the shell-esque world a bionic prosthetic won't be better than the biological option.

Soldiers probably would have some military version of an exoskeleton, one that provides protection and speed more so than lifting power. Though a stealth suit would probably be an even superior option over a military grade exoskeleton. Coupled with some railgun action and a jetpack and you got yourself an OP super soldier. Invisible, flying and can shoot down heavy vehicles.

Yes, yes, nice and basic SF thoughts. But you still leave CP behind at the point and circumvent one of the core questions that these kind of setting ask, augmentation vs. humanity.

[Mr. Mask]

As was mentioned, concealability is a big advantage. It won't let you sneak past metal detectors, but you can go around with some military grade augmentations with just a large coat to conceal it.

It's possible that the bulk of an exoskeleton needing to fit a human in would make it slightly less efficient than cybernetics, but that's highly theoretical.


Florian: It's because the technologies are virtually the same. The only difference is that cybernetics need a more complex interworking with the human body in addition to the robotics involved. That's why I'm wondering how to bring about the core of a CP setting which you mention, humanity vs. function.

[Mastikator]

Yes, yes, nice and basic SF thoughts. But you still leave CP behind at the point and circumvent one of the core questions that these kind of setting ask, augmentation vs. humanity.

No I'm addressing the augmentation vs humanity question. See, since technology is always advancing, and old technology is always obsolete, any technological permanent augmentation you make to yourself will make you become obsolete. Anything that you do not depend on and can easily replace with something better is always than a permanent upgrade.

We should not say no to exoskeletons, they're not inconsistent with cyberpunk as far as I am concerned. But we shouldn't think of them as an augmentation, think of them as tools and vehicles. Unless you decide that technology has reached a plateau, then augmentations start to make sense.

[Cazero]

An good exoskeleton needs to be tailor-made, making it more expensive than implants.

Not the other way round?
This one is pretty heavily dependant of context and setting. But consider this : unlike implants, an exoskeleton can be mass produced in a one size for all fashion. Therefore, your average everyday industrial exoskeleton might have massive agility and response drawbacks compared to implants, and will be unfit for covert-ops or military operations PCs do in shadowrun. They need a tailor-made exoskeleton if they can't or don't want to use implants. Wich means they need to contact manufacturers willing to make tailor-made exoskeletons, and those manufacturers know damn well that people who come to them consider implants a no-no, and they will price their products accordingly.


If you could implant a smart phone into your brain and access it freely, would you?
No I won't. But that's beside the point.
The OP asks for pro of implants to justify their widespread use in shadowrun-like cyberpunk despite their squick factor and the existence of an alternative technology without that squick factor.

[goto124]

IBecause in a few years you'd have a crummy old computer stuck inside you and people around you would be walking around with MUCH better equipment.

Darn it, real life!


circumvent one of the core questions that these kind of setting ask, augmentation vs. humanity.

Possible ideas:


Could be that [not wearing the exoskeleton] causes phantom sensations, even pains after a while. People effectively become addicted to their exoskeleton.

The person becomes so dependant on the exoskeleton, the main difference between "cybernetic" and "exoskeleton" becomes "inside flesh" or "outside flesh".


Implants are faster since they're directly connected to the nervous system while an exoskeleton by definition can't be.
You can't conceal an exoskeleton powerful enough to be a big deal under civilian clothes.

Maybe anything that interacts with the nervous system has to be inside the body, because the

In a stealth-heavy game, PCs being unable to conceal their stuff would be a big deal.

[Mastikator]

The OP asks for pro of implants to justify their widespread use in shadowrun-like cyberpunk despite their squick factor and the existence of an alternative technology without that squick factor.

It makes perfect sense to use bionic implants if technology has reached its peak, or plateau. "This cybernetic eye is better than a biological eye in every way and no better version will come out in your lifetime", ok sign me up. Seems like a smart investment.

[Florian]

@Mr. Mask:

In the end, the technology in and of itself is meaningles. It must be there to pose a dilemma and force a question and doesn't have to be defined above that point.
Please note that we are used to seeking "technocratic" answers to things, so whole-cloth solutions, circumventing the dilemma itself, but that would not be the point here, right?

@Mastikator:

Same as above. You circumvent answering the question that CP poses, as that is something the we tend to do naturally.

[Mastikator]

@Florian, it's hard to answer the question "how to cyberpunk dystopia when exoskeletons ruin fun" when I disagree that exoskeletons ruin the fun or are detrimental to a dystopia.

Umm.. exoskeletons quatrouple work efficiency so only 1/4th of people have jobs. With something like 50% unemployment society plunges into chaos and soldiers called judges in mecha-suits have to keep the order and issue out justice in the streets.

[Florian]

@Florian, it's hard to answer the question "how to cyberpunk dystopia when exoskeletons ruin fun" when I disagree that exoskeletons ruin the fun or are detrimental to a dystopia.

Umm.. exoskeletons quatrouple work efficiency so only 1/4th of people have jobs. With something like 50% unemployment society plunges into chaos and soldiers called judges in mecha-suits have to keep the order and issue out justice in the streets.

I think the answr must be: Don't include the, as they don't touch any of the important aspects of CP.

Drugs? Be effective now, effed up later. Fine.
Cyber or Bio? Peak performance at the loss of humanity? Fine.
Sarariman or Punk? Sure, speed up the downward spiral! Fine.

Now, things like an exoskeleton or further progressing automation are part of the background that led there, but should not be part of the game itself, as they don't accentuate the problem-solution-circle.

[Thinker]

Unless you decide that technology has reached a plateau, then augmentations start to make sense.

You could have some sort of interface that doesn't need to be updated so frequently like USB (4 versions since 1997) that is heavily connected internally. The augmentation parts that are upgraded could be an outpatient procedure - noninvasive and cheap. Additionally, eventually technology will transfer at a rate as fast as human synapses. When that happens, any higher speeds of throughput are irrelevant to human interfaces and there won't need to be difficult changes to human beyond what the augmentation does. Other improvements beyond mental capacity may be less important to replace as quickly. Does it really matter that much if my eye can only see at x100 magnification instead of x110?

As for the question, exosuits versus augmentations, they aren't an either/or. An exosuit might be better for improving the physical attributes of a person, but wouldn't replace the mental or sensory aspects - plugging a smart phone straight into your brain, having an aim-bot or telescope right in your eye, being able to see in infrared or hear like a bat. Exosuits are also more bulky, slower, more obvious than implants, and they can be stolen/confiscated. They require different maintenance and expertise to repair.

Besides all of that, focusing on augmentation versus humanity isn't the only theme you can play up in cyberpunk. There's the struggle with technology - how does society and the individual cope with the new technology? Augmentations are an extension of that and can be replicated without using augmentations. You could have a fine cyberpunk story if you decided that exosuits are a thing, but they only work with people who have a set of implants - a risky and expensive procedures. Is it worth it? You could have another story where exosuits only work properly for people who have the gene that also gives them red hair - a quirk of the interface device. Engineers and scientists are looking for a solution, but in the meantime people are dying there hair so they can get jobs and ignoring the risks they've been warned about. Perhaps the training to use exosuits is too expensive for most people to use them - another tool to control the masses. There's a lot of cyberpunk stories you could do simply about the exosuits and plenty more you can do simply including them in the setting.

[Florian]

@Thinker:

I can only partly agree. I do believe one very important aspect, one that has become lost with things like Shadowrun, is "using something the way the creator has not envisioned", like taking cyberware, created as an advanced form of prostethic and putting it to use as augmentation for the self.
Now, a gun is a gun, a combat exoskeleton is exactly that. Their existence changes things, but they don't showcase what they can be changed into.

[Cluedrew]

Which brings us to the difficult question... how do we get our cyberpunk dystopia when exoskeletons want to ruin the fun?Your answer (I think) is buried in your question: dystopia.

An elite commando uses exoskeleton armour that gives strength and protection. A broken soldier has prosthetic legs from the time he stepped on a mine. The elites have goggles that let them see for kilometres. That 8 year old has a cyber eye because she was caught in the crossfire of a gang fight.

Exoskeletons and the like are, thematically, about enhancing what humanity can do. Bionic limbs are more about trying to make up the difference, to replace what a hard life has taken away, about the sacrifices made. There are a lot of things people forget about article limbs that make them not nearly as good as most movie portray. Star Wars, where interstellar travel is more accessible than flight is today, might have solved those issues. Cyberpunk being of a lower level of technological development (and distribution) probably hasn't. So you have to carry batteries to keep your arm from dying part way through they day. You have to scrub out the connection between it and yourself to keep stump rash from setting in. You might even have to see the doctor about the shoulder problems that residual limb injury caused.

So why do people but up with all these problems? Desperation. Desperation brought on by the retched world they live in.

If you haven't noticed I'm kind of against the idea as cyber "improvements" and I think for the feel of a dystopian story they should not be framed as such. Sure there may be some advantages and for the types of people cyberpunk stories tend to focus around they may not be insignificant advantages, but don't forget the problems that come along with it as well.

[hymer]

Let's not forget that many pieces of technology can work very well for a long time with only minor upgrades. The F-16 has been in operation since, what, early eighties? Cyberlimbs might well fit into that category. You may need to update the software weekly (probably done automatically), and get some circuits and chips switched every few months (which allows you to get into the latest irrational fashion craze as well). But the basic cyberlimb remains the same.
And getting a new model entirely is probably not that difficult. Only the actual neural interface and the physical socket that attaches to the bone structure would require surgery to replace. If built for convenient switching, it might be as simple as putting new tyres on a car.

[TeChameleon]

The answer could be as simple as exoskeletons being unsuited for combat. After all, all you need to do is dent them enough (even 2-3 inches could do it), and you've crippled the wearer- possibly badly enough that they'll (ironically?) end up needing a cyber-arm or -leg. And even if the exoskeletons are more combat-capable, if breacher rounds or Willy Pete (or similar) are common enough, the armour is as likely to be a detriment as a help- your exosuit isn't going to be terribly helpful if it's either being superheated or holding a few hundred millilitres of molten titanium in there with you. In short, the exosuit is only as durable as the squishy thing inside of it.

Essentially, power-armoured soldiers would likely face the same problems that modern-day armour columns face; yes, they can bring tremendous firepower to bear in (for a warzone) surprising levels of safety. But their checks and counters typically cost a miniscule fraction of what the tanks do, both in terms of hardware and training to use said hardware.

Also, in a cyberpunk dystopia, building codes aren't likely to be too strictly adhered to; once you factor in an armoured exosuit being bloody heavy, your hypothetical armoured supersoldier is likely to end up facing the Dalek Dilemma- i.e. if your opponent runs up a flight of stairs, you're not gonna be following.

[Milodiah]

A few minor things I'll say.

Rifts makes a big point of one thing- no matter how awesome you are in your power armor and/or giant robot, you'll eventually find yourself needing to get out of it. Only one major suit is designed for weeks of continuous use, and the rules advise the GM that anyone who does this will suffer from muscular atrophy from not getting any *real* exercise.

A cyborg, on the other hand, is his suit. Unless you're being fairly strict about power consumption/recharging/replacement (and aren't using some kind of mini nuke plant), a cyborg will never be caught unarmed, because the weapon is him. He doesn't need to flip down goggles to see in the dark, his 'real' eyes can do that. He doesn't need to get in a suit to jump across a chasm, because his 'real' legs can do that. He doesn't need to layer on extra armor to take a bullet, because his 'real' dermal-plated skin can do that.

Also, one thing that can be said is that unless one takes the "wire your brain to the suit" route, nearly every method of controlling one will have at least one redundant set of commands as opposed to cyberware. The mech pilot's brain tells his arm to raise, he raises his arm, the suit's system detects he has raised his arm, it tells the suit to match it, the suit raises its arm. The cyborg, on the other hand, has his brain tell his arm to raise, and the augmented arm raises, because it is wired to his brain the same way the pilot's squishy meat arm is. This guarantees that no matter how great the response time of the system is, the pilots are likely to remain at least a tenth of a second behind in the world compared to a cyborg.

That's fine for a construction worker, the boss isn't yelling at you for moving that girder three tenths of a second slower. But imagine a fencing bout between a cyborg and a guy in an exosuit. Every tenth of a second matters.

If you do take the "wire your brain to the suit" route, then why keep the rest of that squishy body? It's not doing you any good, since it's not adding anything to the suit. Might as well take the brain out, fill the holes in the suit where the body used to be with more mechanics, and th-

-Oops, I'm a cyborg now.
*Shrugs*

[Nifft]

Exoskeletons are awesome, but they're not a replacement for cyber-limbs.

Exoskeletons are obvious.
Cyberlimbs are covert.

Exoskeletons are usually off-the-rack and have a visible brand-name.
Cyberlimbs are usually custom-made to the individual.

Military Spec Exoskeletons are for police and infantry.
Military Spec Cyberlimbs are for special forces.

Why would a 'Runner use an exoskeleton?
- Compensation harness for a mini-gun.
- Military Spec Exo disguised as a construction Exo.
- It's a Rigger and s/he is ghosting the drone-rigged Exo, not moving it with his or her meat-body at all.
- Because why the hell not? Having a kick-butt Exo (and a pink mohawk) might be a valid character concept, in games where covert action is not as important as butt-kicking. Basically it's less-good cyber but it wouldn't cost Essence, so it might stack nicely on a Physical Adept.

[Spore]

There's a reason why endoskeletal life forms are superior to exoskeletal ones in certain situations:


The endoskeleton provides bodily structure, allowing the organs to remain in separate areas of the torso while providing upright structure. The ribs and the cranium shield the heart, lungs and brain while the vertebrae give the human body its upright structure. Because the skeleton also grows as the human body grows, the organs and musculature are allowed to develop fully until the body reaches physical maturity. The State University of New York System notes that endoskeletons are more adaptable to supporting a larger weight since they can do so without becoming too heavy on their own. Endoskeletons also grow smoothly without the going through the molting process of exoskeletons.

Endoskeletons allow for the easy attachment of muscles and flexibility. They have numerous joints, which give the body a far greater range of motion than it would have with an exoskeleton. Likewise, the muscles attach directly to the skeleton, allowing for far more precise movements and fine motor skills.

In case you wondered how humans became a dominant species on earth. Because they have fingers and thumbs. If money plays a factor, damages on endoskeletons are far less frequent (but more expensive if they do happen). And to be honest if we took a mild dystopian future like in the Deus Ex series, endoskeletal improvements (or rather, bionic protheses) are probably the most usual thing. Saw of your extremities, attach a pair of robotic legs (and only be dependant on medicine for the rest of your short life).

[Telok]

Cyberlimbs are more likely to be properly insulated and less likely to accidentally clip a power cord.

[VoxRationis]

There is the advantage of not needing a charger for your tech, if you assume the cybernetic implants function with the same metabolites as your cells do (it would require high-efficiency parts, but it's not implausible; it even has the bonus feature of being an effective diet). The reaction time/control advantage has already been noted, plus there's just the fact that they can be prosthetics.

[Sredni Vashtar]

Well, if we're talking a cyberpunk game, maybe cybernetic augmentation isn't that widespread. It's just that only crazy people (i.e. PC's and the characters they interact with regularly) choose to get them, while most of the population only has such prostheses if they need it. That way, you keep the Natural vs. Artificial angle, enhance the dystopia (because PC's in general tend to be and interact with important people, and if all important people are crazy, those who aren't will likely suffer), and you add in a level of elitism to the setting.

[Frozen_Feet]

Cars and wheelchairs have not exactly made prosthetic legs useless.

Exoskeletons are not a replacement for cybernetics. They either exist in addition to cybernetics - because a cyborg can use them jist fine - or they are cybernetics, because the human inside needs to be modified to use them.

Also, to people talking about smartphones and whether you'd want one in your head... does it really matter to the genre that much whether the device is internal or external? Take a good look at all the social, mental and physical ramifications of pretty much everyone having a phone. Overreliance on one makes your memory worse, deprives you of sleep, opens you up to constant stream of marketing by corporations, cyberbullying by ideological fanatics etc. - but not having one can mean social exclusion and being branded a luddite. More, phones are prime example of consumer culture and the laws of capitalism mean in some places it's easier to have a cutting-edge phone, than clean water, food or a decent dayjob.

Is that not cyberpunk?

[Cluedrew]

Some people have talked about or hinted at this but I would talk a bit more about. Cybernetics and exoskeletons are not the same thing nor do they serve the same purpose.

On a fundamental level exoskeletons are tools. Cybernetics and artificial limbs in general are also tools, but they are tools to replace the missing hand you can't pick up a regular tools with. In other words they are really more of a medicine. Put a different way exoskeletons are additions, cybernetics is a replacement.

Everyone in their right mind would choose an exoskeleton. That leaves the crazies and the unfortunates who didn't get to choose getting cybernetic limbs. Now, both of those categories are prominently featured in a lot of cyberpunk stories.


Exoskeletons are awesome, but they're not a replacement for cyber-limbs.Cybernetics are awesome, but they are not a replacement for your natural limbs. However the original statement still stands because cybernetics (prosthetics) does something exoskeletons don't, they replace missing body parts. Exoskeletons by their nature go on top of your still present body parts.

I think that people missing those underlying body parts fit quite well into your average cyberpunk setting.

[Mr. Mask]

Cluedrew: Yeah, this is very true. In the end, you don't really need the chop-shops, so long as you have a lot of people facing the harsh dystopia of being a cyborg. So, maybe brittle bone disease bringing about a lot of poor, indebted cyborgs will be enough (then you go to a chop shop to have your robot arm replaced with a military-grade robot arm).

This brings about the question of whether cyborgs will have a kind of "zipper" implanted, to make future augmentation and repair easier for surgeons (this'd probably be highly unethical, but if it's efficient the it'd fit the dystopia).


Frozen: That brings up an interesting question. Is a cyborg wearing an exosuit stronger than a human wearing an exosuit? Largely, and sadly, I expect it won't make much difference. both because I'm not sure if safety systems would allow you to apply your own strength with the mechanism (if something goes wrong, it'll snap your cyber-limbs), and because you can just add a larger servo to an exo-suit to get the same effect.

I guess if your whole body is more or less cyberized, then 200 pounds of cyber muscle sounds like a worthy addition to an exosuit. That's weight the exosuit would have to support anyway, so it's extra strength free of charge.

Now, will that be enough that armies will start cyberizing troops? Probably not, extra strength isn't quite that tactically advantageous, but it does mean cyborgs will be slightly more desirable for military tasks.

One other advantage to a cyborg, is they're less likely to be injured and bleed out in combat--because presumably if a cybernetic limb is hit it doesn't have arteries that'll bleed out. So, that's in addition to the protection of an exosuit.


While these are nice perks, along with concealability, I have trouble imagining someone cutting their limbs off to get these, or having their spine operated on--it's very expensive for small gains, with notable downsides. Doped up punks and cultists might be into it, which do fit a dystopian cyberpunk setting.



New idea: Marketing. Even if cyborgs aren't actually that much better than exosuits, marketing may cause some people to believe they are. This of course is limited in application, as it'll soon become clear a cybernetic arm doesn't make you superman until you alter most of your skeleton and body. And groups like the military won't be keen on cutting their soldiers apart. Still may work on druggies and cultists to an extent. The fact they always have it on their person would be handy for their lifestyles, where you don't necessarily get to put on an exosuit before someone decides to off you. The system of loaning might also make it easier for criminals to afford cybernetic replacement when they get hurt or just if they want it, the corporation's ability to insert microchips that do unpleasant things if you don't pay them off making it difficult for them to lose too much money on the venture (they'd probably need some interest in wars on the street to make this work).

Also, if enough people have bone diseases that make them cyborgs from early ages, then you might see enough of a cyborg culture spring up that someone is crazy enough to replace something and join in. Some cyborgs will want to present their changes as an improvement, that they're the next stage of humanity. Some people may believe this.


Brain Enhancements and Speedier Cybernetics: If cybernetics of the same weight class are slightly quicker or more agile than exosuits, you can do something with that and brain augmentation. If people think faster, then a slight difference in the time it takes you to move, aim and fire/hit could be considered significant. Especially when combined with concealability with cybernetics. So, this would be a pretty subtle advantage of cybernetics, but one worth consideration.


Handy Shock-Absorbers: I think you could fit some kind of shock-absorbers in a cybernetic hand or arm so that when firing a gun, or punching someone in the face, you feel less recoil and shock from it yourself. This recoil dampening effect could be useful for shooting rapidly, and being able to punch harder is nice (a steel hand makes a heck of a brass-knuckle).

As a side note, an artificial limb might be a good hiding place for weapons and contraband.

[Nifft]

Cybernetics are awesome, but they are not a replacement for your natural limbs.

In a literal sense and in a funcitonal sense, they are exactly and specifically a replacement for your natural limbs.

That's what cybernetic limbs were invented for, in large part: to replace natural limbs which were lost.

You could not be more wrong about this topic.

[Raimun]

Just of the top off my head...

People may ask you to remove your exo-skeleton in polite company... but most likely not your cybernetic arm, since it's a prosthetic.
Cyberhand can be discuised wih a SynthSkin and it looks like a real arm.
Did you lose an arm? Well, you're going to need a cybernetic arm to use an exo-skeleton to its fullest.
As I recall from RPGs, one cyberlimb costs usually less than a full exo-skeleton. Sometimes you only need one metal limb.
Cyber psychos can't get their fix without the classic four limb-replacement. (Okay, it's messed up but this is Cyberpunk.)
Hmm... and what about four cyberlimbs+exo-skeleton hardwired to your body? Now the cyber psychos feel they are getting somewhere.
Exo-skeletons might not be as comfortable when you've got to just chill and hang around.

However, I fear it's biotech that might replace the chrome. Doesn't it sound like a better deal to enhance your body to superhuman levels without becoming a toaster?

[Mr. Mask]

In a literal sense and in a funcitonal sense, they are exactly and specifically a replacement for your natural limbs.

That's what cybernetic limbs were invented for, in large part: to replace natural limbs which were lost.

You could not be more wrong about this topic. I believe he was saying that having perfectly usable arms chopped off and replaced by artificial prosthetics would be crazy. Something crazies might do in a dystopia.


However, I fear it's biotech that might replace the chrome. Doesn't it sound like a better deal to enhance your body to superhuman levels without becoming a toaster? I might be wrong, but I think good biotech is still behind robotics by enough that we may see mechanical arms first. And possibly microactuators/artificial muscle. I would be interested to see more scifi in relation to biotech, as it still seems relatively unexplored.

Aside from microactuators and using unnatural materials, I know little about how biotech could be used to enhance people/animals.

[Frozen_Feet]

@Mr. Mask

Q: are cyborgs wearing an exoskeleton stronger than human wearing an exoskeleton?

A: Not if they're wearing a suit with similar specs.

But a cyborg can wear a stronger suit that would tear a normal human into shreds.

I call this the Extremis treshold, after the famous Iron Man story. When automation advances sufficiently, the pilot becomes the weakest link in the chain.

At that point, you either ditch the pilot (leading to robots) or improve the pilot (leading to cybernetics or bionics).

[Florian]

@Cyberware/Cyborg Conversion:

Say, isn't it the core argument made by cyberpunk that chrome _is_ better than flesh any day of the week, as long as you accept the truth behind what that implies, namely that humanity has found a way to make itself obsolete?

@Bioware:
Isn't that the actial counter argument to this, that humanity also found another way to compete, by changing what humanity actuall is?

[Frozen_Feet]

No, bioware isn't an actual counter-argument. Transhumans and inhumans both make humanity obsolete.

In the end, it just means you can choose between the Matrix and Geneforge.

[Florian]

No, bioware isn't an actual counter-argument. Transhumans and inhumans both make humanity obsolete.

In the end, it just means you can choose between the Matrix and Geneforge.

While I like both, Cyberpunk and Transhumanism, I don't think they are related and should be compared, as they work vastly different, more focusing on the before and the after of that technology-based change.

[Mr. Mask]

@Mr. Mask

Q: are cyborgs wearing an exoskeleton stronger than human wearing an exoskeleton?

A: Not if they're wearing a suit with similar specs.

But a cyborg can wear a stronger suit that would tear a normal human into shreds.

I call this the Extremis treshold, after the famous Iron Man story. When automation advances sufficiently, the pilot becomes the weakest link in the chain.

At that point, you either ditch the pilot (leading to robots) or improve the pilot (leading to cybernetics or bionics). Well, when you get to the stage where the exosuit is moving at speeds which surpass your g-limit. But that shouldn't be likely to happen till you're reaching and performing absurd feats. And even with cybernetic enhancements, it's arguable whether you're able to increase your brain's g-threshold (unless you get a robotic brain). You might be able to build in a shock-absorption system inspired by the woodpecker. If Gs aren't an issue, then it should be a matter of effective safety systems and padding so that you don't break the arm.

Of course, this brings up an interesting point. That padding may add quite a bit of bulk, with a highly powerful exosuit. If you're a cyborg, you don't need all that extra bulk, as your body can take much more kinetic strain.

[Frozen_Feet]

While I like both, Cyberpunk and Transhumanism, I don't think they are related and should be compared, as they work vastly different, more focusing on the before and the after of that technology-based change.

Actually, cybernetics and machine insanity in Cyberpunk are very much related to transhumanism - specifically, they're a cynicist/nihilist take (or perhaps rejection?) on transhumanism.

@Mr. Mask: that point about padding is precisely the sort of thing I wanted you to think about. :smallwink: Modification of the pilot opens up new vistas for modification of the suit.

[Nifft]

I believe he was saying that having perfectly usable arms chopped off and replaced by artificial prosthetics would be crazy. Something crazies might do in a dystopia. That would make it a non-sequitur, though, because PCs are usually "crazies" (in all systems across all genres).

It's like saying magic is rare, but then almost every PC class uses magic. It's not going to be rare in play, even if it's rare in the setting for non-PCs.

In Shadowrun, voluntary limb replacement is looked upon as an oddity by some people, but it does happen -- and involuntary limb replacement is replacement, and that isn't regarded as odd at all, since it's a generally recognized truth that having a cyber-arm is better than having no arm at all.

[Florian]

Crazies? No, not at all.
It's one of the weird cases when the player not attaining full immersion into the character and therefore making choices based on the utility of the equipment and not on the sensibilities of the character or the setting is the only fitting and logical response.
That disconnect showcases us something important here.

[goto124]

Crazy by whose standards? Not the PCs probably :smalltongue:

[Florian]

Crazy by whose standards? Not the PCs probably :smalltongue:

By our standards. The PCs don't exist, neither does the world they play in, but we players do.

[Storm_Of_Snow]

Surprised it's not been mentioned yet, but William Gibson's short story collection, Burning Chrome, has a story with a woman who's in an exoskeleton because she's suffering from some terminal condition - it's The Winter Market. There's also Dogfight which has a guy in a wheelchair.

But to defend their presence (and allow people to invert the reasons if they think they shouldn't be there), maybe they could be the only things viable for degenerative conditions that haven't had a cure discovered, like MS or Motor Neurone, or possibly supporting sufferers of conditions like Parkinsons or Cerebral Palsy, where the motor nerves are damaged or malfunctioning to the point cybernetics couldn't be attached to them, and only direct taps into the CNS make movement possible - which may be too invasive/expensive for cybernetics.

Alternatively, if the Cyberpunk universe has moderately easy access to space flight and orbital/non-terrestrial habitats, people normally living in low-G environments might need to wear exoskeletons to help support them when they are required to be on higher-G ones.

Or it's a matter of choice, some people prefer biotech - gene therapies, implanted tissues and organs, steroids and so on, some go for cybertech, and some go for old school exoframes and external systems that can be disabled more easily in the event of someone hitting them with something like an EMP or hacking them.

Doesn't mean there'd be that many of them, but they could be present.

[LordFluffy]

Style over substance?

That is a core CP concept, after all....

[Cluedrew]

In a literal sense and in a funcitonal sense, they are exactly and specifically a replacement for your natural limbs.Yeah... that could have been worded better. Mr. Mask had the right idea, what I was getting at is that although cybernetics are meant to replace your natural limbs they ultimately don't in that they don't in that they don't measure up to the natural limb.


That would make it a non-sequitur, though, because PCs are usually "crazies" (in all systems across all genres).I was referring to a more narrow definition of crazy. Lunatic cultists, "unity with the overmind" (which by the way may not exist) type of crazy. If we expand the definition of crazy to be the "PC special" sort of crazy than not even the crazies are not going to do it.

The reason is, and this is the thing I think most people are missing, artificial limbs aren't actually that great. In addition the problems are such that to fix them completely it will likely (not definitely) that it will require "transhuminisum" levels of technology, which is far beyond most cyberpunk settings. Until we reach that level losing your arm and getting a prosthetic is still a very real loss.


since it's a generally recognized truth that having a cyber-arm is better than having no arm at all.Except by amputees. Err, well at the level of modern prosthetics (again, I'm assuming a near-future level of technology, without hand wave rapid advancement). Not in all situations of course, for example any situation that requires "grip" will usually necessitate the use of an artificial arm. But for general tasks often enough whatever is left and even if it isn't being free of the very heavy and uncomfortable add on is usually worth it. Less so for leg amputees as humans are built to walk on two legs, but even there often they will pop their legs off when they sit down for a while.

Perhaps I am going on this point too hard, but I think it is important and also explains my view of cyberlimbs as a symbol of the loss and hardships a dystopian society inflicts. Something you don't get from exoskeletons.

May I forward as a replacement to cyberlimb-upgrades "argumentation", that is to say adding small enhancers into your body instead of replacing large parts of it. The form of the enhancers would change depending the argumentation, most would probably be miniaturized and implanted forms of external upgrades (you know, for the crazies) but a few might be unique. For instance implants in your major musle groups could drain away the waste products of exertion allowing you to push yourself longer and harder. There would probably be side effects but that also fits the theme.

[TheThan]

What if not everyone gets cybernetics?
Think about it; cybernetics has to be expensive; micro-circuitry, motors and servos built to precise tolerances; designed to integrate into the human body seamlessly and custom built for each user. Add in exotic materials that are at least as strong and light as human bone and you can see how it’d be prohibitively expensive. That’s just a basic cybernetic limb; if you want one that’ll do more, it’s going to cost you more. So it’s safe to assume that cybernetics for fashion is out of reach of most people. Instead the only people that are going to have it are those that have need of it; military personnel, and the sick and injured.

Industrial accidents is a good place to start; a work force is cheap and life means little in cyberpunk so unscrupulous megacorps wouldn’t bat an eye at unsafe working conditions. They shell out for replacement limbs every so often and now they own that worker. He can’t quit or they’ll pull out his prosthetics; but only those that are useful to the megacorp gets those implants though. A dock worker with a military background loses his arm in an industrial accident. The megacorp buys him a replacement limb and starts sending him on covert missions for them. He can’t refuse or they’ll fire him and pull his prosthetics. It’d be a good background for a sympathetic NPC or even for a PC.

Enhanced soldiers is par for the course as well; you join the military you can get an augmented body (assuming you meet the right criteria for the enhancements). Faster, stronger; more durable; better soldiers. this naturally extends to corporate security as well. need an enforcer or someone to protect your investments; cybered up security men is the way to go.

Then you can have fun with it. those enhances soldiers? Their cyberware was built by the megacorps and they have secret programming in it that can be used to brain wash the soldiers into working for them; preforming covert tasks for them. Nobody will ever know it was happening though, not even the person affected. after all; those soldiers are more machine than man, and those machines were made and installed by the megacorps that makes them theirs.

Cybernetics is natural evolution of medicine. The OP already mentioned brittle bone disease; but I’m sure there are a ton of other diseases out there that could be handled with cybernetics. I can think of two right now that has personally affected my family; ALS and Rheumatoid Arthritis. These are two incurable diseases that cripple you. Heck ALS is terminal. But if you can replace those non-functioning limbs and organs with cybernetic limbs and organs; then they are effectively cured. Guess what; they’re expensive; that megacorp you work for will pay for the procedures but you have to do bad things for them in return. Congratulations now you’re owned by that megacorp.

How does exo-suits fit into this. Well obviously they’re a shortcut. Want an enhanced worker but don’t want to pay for one? Buy an exoskeleton. Need cyber-soldiers but don’t want to pay for them or you don’t have good enough tech? Buy some combat-exoskeletons and you’re done. The one thing cybersuits really can’t replace is lost limbs and damaged (or lost) organs. But then again; we’re talking about a technology that’s not as robust to begin with.

Granted I’m thinking more Ellen Ripley’s power loader and less Bubblegum Crisis Hardsuits. But I think you get the idea.

[Deffers]

An exoskeleton is more agile than the machines we have nowadays, but it's still less agile than what implants get you.

This is accurate, except in that we have exoskeletons today. Anywho. Our current tech for implants is based on two routes-- one is directly jacking the inputs to your nervous system (DARPA's ReNET system being one example), and one is based on nerve impulses picked up through the skin (The OpenBionics 3D printable arm being a good example of this). The former is what it sounds like, and presently we're OK at it but as you can imagine it requires invasive surgery and currently we're working out kinks in the connections between nervous tissue and connections degrading over time. Myoelectric impulses, on the other hand, are signals from the nervous system picked up through the skin. Nifty stuff if the best thing you had before was a hook, but there's some caveats.

The main problem with myoelectric prostheses is, as you might imagine, picking up the shifts in current based on the nerves under your skin means you're picking up a very attenuated signal. That means signal processing-- noise reduction and the such. Then you have to interpret the signals you're picking up, a process that usually involves "training" your mind to think of up, down, grip, that sorta thing. So you have to pick up the signal, process the signal, and then do the forward kinematics for that signal onto some kind of closed-loop controller. We're gonna assume it's closed loop, at least, for the sake of everyone's sanity. Otherwise the whole process just gets stupid.

As you might imagine, then, the natural impulse would be for prostheses to move to direct neural interfaces while exoskeletons get stuck with the relatively bulky and imprecise (but still likely better than what you're imagining right now) myoelectric interface, especially because exoskeletons inherently have feedback control that a prosthesis acts (that is, if your algorithm for processing the signal guesses wrong, it has the feedback from your actual muscles to correct itself within milliseconds).

What most people are leaving out, though, would be that it'd be relatively simple to get a bunch of implants that just let you directly interface with an exoskeleton when you put it on. Now, for a dock worker, this'd be stupid. Lifting a bag of cement is not a high-finesse operation. Your shady megacorp doesn't need to start making a cyborg out of someone when they'll get by just fine on a myoelectric suit that you can probably use machine learning to develop a greater affinity towards a particular pilot anyway. If you're some kinda military man, though, directly hooking into your exoskeleton might be best suited to your preferred use case, especially if you still utilize myoelectric sensors to create movement correction. It would also obviate the need for hands to do things like firing a weapon, meaning that you can get away with some stupid recoil-compensation schemes since your gun's stuck to your exoskeleton.

This actually meshes decently well with a cyberpunk future. You'd have your shady lone operatives getting a rather niche implant to utilize a deadly tool to the maximum abilities-- a tool that, I might add, they still have to train with (predictive algorithm or no, working an exoskeleton takes some getting used to. Try to think about moving and let the suit do the work).

To me, exoskeletons work just fine in a cyberpunk world. They've got use cases that are mostly wholly separate from implants, and even if they weren't, implants have an advantage in that they're cheaper. An exoskeleton is basically going to be a full-body prosthetic with full-body sensors, full body array of servomotors, and consequently a full-body array of controllers and processors to make the damn thing work. A prosthetic, meanwhile, has a limiting cost factor of the price of surgery. If you make surgery cheap enough through, say, robotically-assisted surgery and megacorp-influenced availability of medicine, your average cyberpunk protagonists are gonna probably prefer the implants to what would basically be civilian gear they'd have to upgrade to be useful in combat (or difficult-to-hide black market military gear). The high point, a combination of these two techniques as outlined above, would combine the worst of both worlds, requiring expensive surgery to support an expensive suit with expensive custom firmware. There's also the question of a power source, where an exoskeleton is going to require more power. Cybernetics might hypothetically draw power from your body's biological processes/movements, depending on how advanced the fuel cell tech is in your world of choice, vastly simplifying things for the implant user. Exoskeleton? Gonna have to strap a pretty significant battery on that bad boy.

If it's not obvious yet, incidentally, I'm getting a degree in robotics. So if you've got questions, ask 'em and I'll try to answer.

[Grinner]

This is a fascinating thread, but I fear you all may be overthinking this:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=AzjYtaZwjEM#t=901

Edit: Darn...It didn't keep the time. Skip to 15:00.

[Nifft]

Yeah... that could have been worded better. Mr. Mask had the right idea, what I was getting at is that although cybernetics are meant to replace your natural limbs they ultimately don't in that they don't in that they don't measure up to the natural limb.

The reason is, and this is the thing I think most people are missing, artificial limbs aren't actually that great. In addition the problems are such that to fix them completely it will likely (not definitely) that it will require "transhuminisum" levels of technology, which is far beyond most cyberpunk settings. Until we reach that level losing your arm and getting a prosthetic is still a very real loss. In Shadowrun, which is one of the cyberpunk games under discussion here, losing your arm and getting a cybernetic replacement has a game-mechanics effect (via Essence loss) but not a quality-of-life effect.


Except by amputees. Err, well at the level of modern prosthetics (again, I'm assuming a near-future level of technology, without hand wave rapid advancement). 1) Yes, emphatically these will be used and loved by amputees. You're exactly wrong about that. If someone has already lost a limb, and the choice is either no limb or a cyberpunk cybernetic limb, they'd have to be insane to choose no limb.

I thought you were talking about voluntary amputees, who could plausibly be unusual. But if you're talking about all amputees then you're way off base.

2) If you're assuming near-future technology level, then you're assuming a tech level which is NOT cyberpunk, and you're not in the right thread. This thread is about cyberpunk level technology, not limited to next year's medical products.

[NichG]

The more you chop off, the fewer places there are for cancer to take hold, the fewer places there are that can't be replaced when they get old and start malfunctioning.

So what about a cyberpunk world where the life expectancy has hit 300 or upwards? Furthermore, one where life expectancy directly correlates to how much of your potentially failure-ridden biological bits you've replaced with modular cybernetics? If you have a biological heart, you can end up with a heart attack as a result of systemic shock, but that cyber heart will keep on beating regardless of how much pain or trauma the rest of your body experiences, and you can even build in a backup failsafe.

In such a world, it won't be the arms and legs that get replaced first, but all the organs. The heart alone gets you 50 years on your life expectancy. The lungs get you another 20. Then the stomach, pancreas, and intestines each pull another 10, with a nice synergy bonus of an extra +20 years from reduced vulnerability to external infectious agents and cancers if you get them all. And we never did find a cure for Alzheimers, but cybernetic replacement of certain brain areas can hold it off or replace the lost functionality.

[Cluedrew]

If you're assuming near-future technology level, then you're assuming a tech level which is NOT cyberpunkOK here I think may be the real source of disagreement. I put down "assuming near-future technology" because I understand that it is not a given for all cyberpunk settings, but I do think it is an option and (for reasons I will get to later) I feel it is the iconic level of technology.

I don't think the exact level of technology is actually important for cyberpunk, not compared to the state of society at least. If you told me about a "cyberpunk" story where humans had colonised most of the planets and travel between them took a week tops, I'd say that is more advanced than most cyberpunk stories, but I wouldn't say it isn't a cyberpunk story because of that.

I should also clarify that "near-future" here does not mean next year, or even a decade from now. It is about 30-50 years, give or take however much you want, the number of years isn't actually important. Maybe I should use a different term for it, but it usually works. I put cyberpunk at a level where technological advancement has, at most, just started to create fundamental shifts, society hasn't settled back down yet. So yes prosthetics would be better than they are today, but I don't think they would be approaching seamless replacements yet.

As for why I think that is the iconic level of technology. Well technology in cyberpunk has an alarming tendency to not solve problems, not without creating more at least. A line I see commonly assonated with ShadowRun is "Every thing has a price." So you guess I could say my issue is that level of cybernetics solves the problem to cleanly. Also a "society in transition" provides a very good stage for the dystopia, not that bad places can't exist else where but that works well.

And no, I do not speak for all amputees. You could say I don't even speak for amputees. But I can say that those things I described (with amputees and prosthetics) are things I've actually seen, so they do happen.

In conclusion... if my ideas of cyberpunk don't mess with yours you don't have to use them. Hey, I don't always use them. My last cyberpunk story had a character with a "full body transplant" (aka the brain was the main body part left) which is more advanced than I would put in my general cyberpunk story but for the story I wanted to tell that time it worked.

[Mr. Mask]

Cluedrew: The difficult with enhancing the existing body, is you need to change a lot of stuff to get a macro effect. You could implant a metal plate into their knuckles or harden the bone in their knuckles to give them a nastier punch, but a set of brass-knuckles will be much more convenient , cheaper and safer. You could add titanium plating to the ribs to make them more resistant to damage, though that's quite a surgical procedure (a real one, but not intended for combat enhancements)--with methods for more convenient surgery, that might become popular. If you enhance any bone or muscle, it's liable to be a problem for the rest of the muscles and skeleton when you try to make use of that added strength/durability.

Dermal armour is the best I can think of for enhancing the body, adding titanium plates to bones or something like carbon nanotube weaves to skin.


TheThan: Well, my main concern was injuries that necessitate the replacement of the spine, as that's necessary to gain much in the way of enhanced strength from cybernetics. I guess instead of seeing people in wheelchairs, we'd see people with powerful cybernetic legs.


Deffers: Good points. One question I have. Are there any advantages to a cybernetic arm that starts at the elbow? I guess you could flick your wrist with surprising speed, or open jars really well, or squeeze the heck out of someone, but for stuff like applying force or lifting stuff, then there ought to be prohibitive strain on your shoulder. I mentioned the idea of putting shock-absorbers in the arm, that might allow you to exert more force in a punch without harming your shoulder, or might be able to absorb some recoil from a gun, but that was the best I could think of for enhancing features.


Nifft: While Shadowrun has no mechanics for quality of life, some of their writing hinted that cyberlimbs weren't all they're cracked up to be.

You seem to have not understood what Cluedrew was saying. Much of fiction glazes over the disadvantages of prosthetics. They can chafe, the weight of them can stretch one of your limbs or make you lopsided if you wear them all the time, and as Cluedrew mentioned amputees will sometimes detach them when they're sitting down. With your idea few amputees won't want a robotic limb, is that from an amputee you've known? Because I've seen amputees with no prosthetic despite such being available, and I don't assume them to be insane.

We could probably have a cyberpunk dystopia already, if robot limbs were a bit more common among urban poor (and with 3D printed limbs, we're nearly to the point where they could be). Cyberpunk doesn't have a strict technological requirement.


Nich: We're likely to see that. Though, organ replacement would probably be when the organs have started to decline and fail. Currently, synthetic hearts are considered pretty temporary, with alarm systems for if (when, more like) they fail to bring an ambulance in. There are various problems with them breaking down, getting jammed, or potentially bubbling the blood (which can be fatal and result in terrible brain damage). Other synthetic organs are similarly inferior to natural organs presently, though eventually they may actually become equal or superior. Of course, with organ cloning going the way it is, it seems plausible we'll have effective cloned organ replacements before we get to improved synthetic organs.

[Deffers]

Deffers: Good points. One question I have. Are there any advantages to a cybernetic arm that starts at the elbow? I guess you could flick your wrist with surprising speed, or open jars really well, or squeeze the heck out of someone, but for stuff like applying force or lifting stuff, then there ought to be prohibitive strain on your shoulder. I mentioned the idea of putting shock-absorbers in the arm, that might allow you to exert more force in a punch without harming your shoulder, or might be able to absorb some recoil from a gun, but that was the best I could think of for enhancing features.

Well, one major advantage is having a forearm at all. :P As to why you shouldn't just chop it off at the shoulder altogether-- well, that's a whole lotta good nerve endings going to waste if you do that. Remember, more nerve space equals better signal reception, both for something myoelectric or something ReNET style. Maybe you'd want to leave parts of the original organic bits in for those reasons. As for mechanically speaking, if you're shooting a gun, I believe your wrist and elbow are important for recoil compensation. It's possible you could still do something with that. I also think it's easier to strap a prosthesis in at the elbow, which means you can somewhat compensate if your augments get on the heavy side-- which also means being able to still dish out a relatively mean swing with the thing, if it comes to that. Beyond that, I'm pretty sure something shoulder mounted might, depending on weight constraints, have to be essentially just bolted right on to your bones for stability. That means it's not as easily removable.

I can't think of much else off the top of my head, I'll be honest. The stress thing is an issue, but really heavy lifting pretty much always comes with having to reinforce the spine, no matter what. Cost's probably an issue, too, and maybe a limiting factor in a cyberpunk setting for your average Joe.

[Nifft]

You seem to have not understood what Cluedrew was saying. Much of fiction glazes over the disadvantages of prosthetics. I understood him perfectly, and he knows it, and I was able to discern and point out the specific area of our seeming disagreement. Did you not understand my previous post, and also not understand his last two posts? Because that ought to be clear.


They can chafe, the weight of them can stretch one of your limbs or make you lopsided if you wear them all the time, and as Cluedrew mentioned amputees will sometimes detach them when they're sitting down. As I discussed before, current medical technology is not at all like cyberpunk prosthetic limbs, which have the ability to do stuff like communicate a sense of touch. Problems with current medical technology are not the same problems that cyberpunk cybernetic limbs share.

Current medical tech is not relevant to cyberpunk.

It's like you're discussing how people feel about a glass eye in a discussion about cyberware eyes. The difference is that a cyberware eye allows you to see.

[goto124]

Still relevant, just that we have to extrapolate a bit. Especially if we want drawbacks.

[Mr. Mask]

Nifft: Well, I think Cluedrew gave a pretty good answer. I can't really think of any cyberpunk that works without a hitch.



Deffers: Interesting. If I may ask further, how much do you think you could do if you replaced a whole skeleton? I guess with modern robotics and materials, it's still going to be inferior to a natural skeleton and muscles.

[Deffers]

Deffers: Interesting. If I may ask further, how much do you think you could do if you replaced a whole skeleton? I guess with modern robotics and materials, it's still going to be inferior to a natural skeleton and muscles.

That starts getting simultaneously far beyond my wheelhouse and, where it intersects with my wheelhouse, so complex a problem I should be asking for grant money from the NSF to figure it out. :smalltongue:

That being said, I'll try to answer the problem to the best of my abilities and highlight where the problems would end or begin.

Utilizing dumb bullcrap like titanium, we can already make bones well in excess of human bones in terms of strength and toughness. Fun fact: there's a family out there who has a genetic quirk that makes their bones eight times denser than the norm. They tend to shrug off things like car accidents that would pulp most of us. So if we replaced a whole skeleton with modern/near-future materials we could get into some reeeeeaaally strong stuff. Especially if we look into composite materials.

Where things start getting weird is when we get to tendons and ligaments. In my personal opinion, the most interesting part of the human body is its connective tissue. It can heal like the rest of our body as well as self-lubricate, meaning that if you give your body proper rest, healing, and diet, you can totally live your life without any of those bits wearing down. If you replaced the bones of your body, I'm guessing you'd have to be a complete wizard to not replace tendons, ligaments, and the cushions between them. Things get kind of weird here, because it's hard to create a self-lubricating, lubricant-generating system. You'd have to oil up your joints manually somehow, basically. Now, this isn't as bad as it might initially sound. Bones rubbing together have a really high coefficient of friction, what with being porous crystalline structures. Using materials like ultra-high molecular weight polyethylene on steel or similar metallic surfaces, you get a waaaaay lower coefficient of friction. This is why some artificial knees are really great. This is where you'd want to talk to a materials engineer instead of a mechanical engineer.


This also brings up another concern. If you're replacing a whole skeleton, are you then deciding to use things like servos just... bolted onto that skeleton, and obviate the whole muscle/tendon thing? In that case, you can look forward to significantly improved performance. the HAL exoskeletons out of Japan (yes, they're actually called that) are quite the strength-boosters already (effortlessly lift three bags of dirt like you find in a Home Depot one-handed!) and they had to be designed around a human user. If you get the human out of the way, you'd probably get way more room for servomotors, controllers, and power storage. Bigger servomotors means you can potentially get greater torque out of them, and you can gear them to be faster too. For things like hand-to-hand combat that translates to being really strong. You'd have to figure out how to do nervous system connections and how to teach someone to use a whole skeleton, which is significantly non-trivial, though. Like, would you Sub Zero someone and take out their skull and spinal cord, then replace the vertebrae with something else? How would you keep track of all your nerve endings? We're talking surgery that demands robotic precision, and beyond that the robot in question would probably make H.R. Giger shrink. If you figured out how to do that, well then yeah. You'd have a pretty strong robot. Or you could make successive replacements over time, starting from the bottom up. You'd probably just be shielding and reinforcing the spinal cord instead of going through all the trouble of trying to replace it with everything else intact there, though. You may notice we're really bad at balancing robots, though, so make sure you don't mess with the inner ear. Hard to imagine how you'd transmit signals to the brain from accelerometers, let's be real.

The question gets interesting if you decide to go ahead with the whole artificial tendons thing into artificial muscle instead of servos. How good you can make that is an open question begging for a solution, because you'll likely need to create a system for closed loop control for those because they can be used frequently. The reason servos come up so often in robotics is because they're a special type of motor that has closed-loop control-- that is, it can actually tell how many degrees it's rotated based on a break-beam style sensor. Doing that for existing artificial muscles is... really difficult, because they're based on linear displacement rather than rotation (and really messy linear rotation based on a constant volume with changing dimensions).

In the end, though, you'd probably have a cyborg that's pretty good at land-based movement and a decidedly terrible swimmer. Frankly, though, you might be tempted to just forego the whole "bipedal" thing at that point. There's a guy in Snow Crash who's pretty much a some of a torso and a head shoved into an APC, with a VR interface that makes him perceive himself as still having a body while piloting his car from what's effectively a desktop. If you do that, then hell yes, we can immediately make a bitchin' tank-person.

[Storm_Of_Snow]

That starts getting simultaneously far beyond my wheelhouse and, where it intersects with my wheelhouse, so complex a problem I should be asking for grant money from the NSF to figure it out. :smalltongue:

That being said, I'll try to answer the problem to the best of my abilities and highlight where the problems would end or begin.

Utilizing dumb bullcrap like titanium, we can already make bones well in excess of human bones in terms of strength and toughness. Fun fact: there's a family out there who has a genetic quirk that makes their bones eight times denser than the norm. They tend to shrug off things like car accidents that would pulp most of us. So if we replaced a whole skeleton with modern/near-future materials we could get into some reeeeeaaally strong stuff. Especially if we look into composite materials.

Where things start getting weird is when we get to tendons and ligaments. In my personal opinion, the most interesting part of the human body is its connective tissue. It can heal like the rest of our body as well as self-lubricate, meaning that if you give your body proper rest, healing, and diet, you can totally live your life without any of those bits wearing down. If you replaced the bones of your body, I'm guessing you'd have to be a complete wizard to not replace tendons, ligaments, and the cushions between them. Things get kind of weird here, because it's hard to create a self-lubricating, lubricant-generating system. You'd have to oil up your joints manually somehow, basically. Now, this isn't as bad as it might initially sound. Bones rubbing together have a really high coefficient of friction, what with being porous crystalline structures. Using materials like ultra-high molecular weight polyethylene on steel or similar metallic surfaces, you get a waaaaay lower coefficient of friction. This is why some artificial knees are really great. This is where you'd want to talk to a materials engineer instead of a mechanical engineer.

You called? :smallsmile: (Degree in Materials Engineering, although I'm not working in that field, and I'll happily step aside for anyone that is).



This also brings up another concern. If you're replacing a whole skeleton, are you then deciding to use things like servos just... bolted onto that skeleton, and obviate the whole muscle/tendon thing? In that case, you can look forward to significantly improved performance. the HAL exoskeletons out of Japan (yes, they're actually called that) are quite the strength-boosters already (effortlessly lift three bags of dirt like you find in a Home Depot one-handed!) and they had to be designed around a human user. If you get the human out of the way, you'd probably get way more room for servomotors, controllers, and power storage. Bigger servomotors means you can potentially get greater torque out of them, and you can gear them to be faster too. For things like hand-to-hand combat that translates to being really strong. You'd have to figure out how to do nervous system connections and how to teach someone to use a whole skeleton, which is significantly non-trivial, though. Like, would you Sub Zero someone and take out their skull and spinal cord, then replace the vertebrae with something else? How would you keep track of all your nerve endings? We're talking surgery that demands robotic precision, and beyond that the robot in question would probably make H.R. Giger shrink. If you figured out how to do that, well then yeah. You'd have a pretty strong robot. Or you could make successive replacements over time, starting from the bottom up. You'd probably just be shielding and reinforcing the spinal cord instead of going through all the trouble of trying to replace it with everything else intact there, though. You may notice we're really bad at balancing robots, though, so make sure you don't mess with the inner ear. Hard to imagine how you'd transmit signals to the brain from accelerometers, let's be real.

The question gets interesting if you decide to go ahead with the whole artificial tendons thing into artificial muscle instead of servos. How good you can make that is an open question begging for a solution, because you'll likely need to create a system for closed loop control for those because they can be used frequently. The reason servos come up so often in robotics is because they're a special type of motor that has closed-loop control-- that is, it can actually tell how many degrees it's rotated based on a break-beam style sensor. Doing that for existing artificial muscles is... really difficult, because they're based on linear displacement rather than rotation (and really messy linear rotation based on a constant volume with changing dimensions).

In the end, though, you'd probably have a cyborg that's pretty good at land-based movement and a decidedly terrible swimmer. Frankly, though, you might be tempted to just forego the whole "bipedal" thing at that point. There's a guy in Snow Crash who's pretty much a some of a torso and a head shoved into an APC, with a VR interface that makes him perceive himself as still having a body while piloting his car from what's effectively a desktop. If you do that, then hell yes, we can immediately make a bitchin' tank-person.
On a materials perspective, there is wear to consider - as you said, biological systems can self-repair, mechanical systems can't, although I did see something a while back about a carbon nanosheet healing up by free carbon atoms dropping into the structure. But you can probably add some external ports for regular top ups if it's a fluid, or replace a soft material every other decade or so, so long as the fluids or wear particles are biologically neutral (which is why implants are made of stuff like Titanium, a few very high grade steels, certain plastics and some ceramics), or cannot leave the joint to get out into the rest of the body and cause problems.

On a biological perspective, which is probably where the major issue lies, the bone marrow in your body is the production site for all your blood cells (red and white) - you'd pretty much have to scoop the marrow out, stuff it into the replacement structure, then plumb blood vessels into it, otherwise the person's not going to be living that long.

Maybe a carbon-fibre or Kevlar wrap might be the way to go.

[Deffers]

Oh wow. I actually entirely forgot about the blood, yeah. I mean, there's some stuff being proposed when it comes to artificial blood, but it's still a developing technology, and even so you'd need a way to circulate that artificial blood and then clean it, even if you reduced the amount needed to only account for the brain. So you'd need some sort of jury-rigged, compact dialysis setup. You'll have to take that in to weight and space considerations, and that's way beyond my pay grade. Add that in to the weight and space calculations. My hunch is at first a cyborg's chest cavity is gonna be a busy place.

[Eldan]

No, you wouldn't need dialysis. The problem is that without bones, your body isn't producing white or red blood cells.
Red blood cells live for about a hundred days before dying and being excreted. You'd need some kind of new organ that regularly cloned your blood cells. So, if your bones are taken out, you have a ticking clock before you certainly suffocate from the inside out. Probably much less than 100 days, too.
For white blood cells, it varies by type. The shortest lived leukocytes live for a few hours, so after that, you'd be pretty open to fungal infections. 8-10 days for parasites. A few weeks for viruses. You'd get something like a combination of Aids and Leukemia, just much faster than either.

[Deffers]

A combination... of AIDS... and leukemia. That's certainly a way to go. And I guess you wouldn't need dialysis, since we never talked about removing the internal organs. I just kinda forgot.

I wonder if artificial blood's equivalent of red blood cells can be fabricated inside of a chest cavity. My cursory wiki-surfing tells me that's highly unlikely.

[Florian]

Out of curiosity, why the fascination with using cyberware to improve things that we do consider to be useless compared to the tools we have at hand?
So, for example, what is so interesting about beefing up the strength of a cyber arm?

As far as I can see it, the military application is simple raplacing man with machine, as machine simply breaks down and can be replaces, while man as the more fragile thing that has got to rest and heal. Ghost in the Shell got it about right by keeping up mentioning that the protagonists wear custom bodies, while the regular military use off the shelf identical ones.

Ok, that is going the way of full body replacement. On a smaller scale, I can only see the real sense in improving upon the human form when we talk about criminal activity here, like including a smuggling department, hidden weapon or including night vision in cyber eyes and such.

[JoeJ]

For straight up military applications, I would make cyborgs weaker than exoskeletons. Because powersuits can be made arbitrarily large, they can also be stronger, tougher, and with heavier weapons. Armies like them because they can be mass produced quickly, and if one is damaged you can just issue the pilot a new one while the damaged one is being repaired. They're treated like miniature armored vehicles; not really able to stand against tanks, but fantastic for platoon level support and recon.

On the down side, a 3 meter tall suit of powered armor is not exactly something you can disguise with a trench coat and a pair of sunglasses. Unless you're the government or a corporation, you can't legally own a powersuit, and walking through town in one is definitely going to attract the wrong kind of attention. Adventurers, criminals, and other shady types are forced to use cybernetic replacement if they want more (or more concealable) firepower than can fit in a holster. That's probably illegal as well, but at least it can be hidden.

In this kind of game, the main function of powered armor is as a danger to watch out for. If the PCs get into a battle with corp. security, they'll have to finish it quickly, before the powersuits show up with firepower that they can't match. Alternatively, obtaining plans or a prototype for a new type of armor can be a mission. They PCs can't use it themselves, but there are plenty of governments and/or corporations that they can sell it to.

[Florian]

Why three meters?
That sounds like being a very awkward and inpractical size.
Too tall for real urban deployment, as they can't enter regular urban buildings (for example, standard door height here is 2m) and would either need to use sepparate means of transportation or must constantly move on their own power.

Taller ones are awkward, too, as they pose a huge silhouette without packing as much punch or armour as a comparatible IFV.

So, this will propably lead us back to the taw strength question. Yes, it could pack a bigger weapon, but I don't see it being able to enter the fray with it,

[JoeJ]

Why three meters?
That sounds like being a very awkward and inpractical size.
Too tall for real urban deployment, as they can't enter regular urban buildings (for example, standard door height here is 2m) and would either need to use sepparate means of transportation or must constantly move on their own power.

Taller ones are awkward, too, as they pose a huge silhouette without packing as much punch or armour as a comparatible IFV.

So, this will propably lead us back to the taw strength question. Yes, it could pack a bigger weapon, but I don't see it being able to enter the fray with it,

No particular reason for 3m, I just picked a number. They can bend to get through smaller doorways, but they're probably also strong enough to just make the doorway bigger. Remember that this is something designed for battlefield use, so a little collateral damage is not a major consideration. A powersuit probably can't go toe-to-toe with a tank, but they'd be great as heavy weapons support for an infantry platoon. Whatever transport the platoon uses would be designed to carry a couple of powersuits as well, and on foot they're at least as fast as the other troops, so mobility is not a problem.

Corp. security would probably have only a very small number of powersuits to use as reinforcements in extreme situations (i.e. things are already so bad that damage to company property is not a major concern). Corp mercenaries would use them on the battlefield just like a government army, but that's a much less common environment for cyberpunk PCs to be in.

[goto124]

'Make the doorway bigger'

Sorry, that cracked me up :smallbiggrin:

[Mr. Mask]

Storm-of-Snow: Neat, good luck with your career.

On the earlier subject of enhancement and replacement, can you think of any materials that would make a good replacement for skin? I recall some story that have people with their skin replaced as kevlar or such, and wondered if such a thing was possible. Or more, if there was a material that'd be worth having as skin.


Deffers: I need to thank you for the brilliant participation. That was a read worth remembering. This makes me wonder what organs you could replace with mechanical ones, but that's a bit outside your field :smalltongue:.

A question that has come up before which I would like to ask about. Would it be possible to create a robotic exoskeleton where the wearer can add their own strength to the process? That is, if the exoskeleton can lift 500 pounds, and the person can lift 300 pounds, together they can lift 800 pounds? I figure this isn't possible for a couple of reasons, but I'd like to hear it from the horse's mouth, if it's not trouble.

[Iron Angel]

You gotta love cyberpunk, with its mechanical limbs, bleak futuristic cities, the moral question of function versus humanity with people replacing their parts, the ideals of a new stage of society, etc.. ....Then you have exoskeletons.

The same as a prosthetic arm or body, except you wear it. All the benefits of cyber limbs without the deficits. There are even plans for external brain-enhancing microchips and the like. The only innate advantage cybernetics have is reduced bulk, at the price of elaborate and invasive surgery.

Which brings us to the difficult question... how do we get our cyberpunk dystopia when exoskeletons want to ruin the fun?


One idea I had on this light, was something like osteogenesis imperfecta (brittle-bone disease) becoming much more common, so many people are having much of their skeletons reinforced or replaced with cybernetic ones. These people, unfortunately, may end up in heavy debt to corporations who pay for this treatment. Some of these down-trodden citizens may decide to opt for further "enhancement", and seek out military or criminal work as a result of their debts.
Having the spine replaced in particular is important to a cyborg, as you can't have a super-strong arm without a supporting super-strong shoulder and spine.

Another higher-tech idea was to have some kind of nanomachine or archaea that can alter the the bone and muscle make-up of the host. So slowly your limbs become semi-artificial structures with greatly enhanced muscle, skin, and bones. Of course, it'd be questionable if your body could heal or even control such limbs and bones.


Anyone else have ideas for why and how you can create a cyberpunk haven?

My first instinct is that the differences between a cyberlimb and an exoskeleton are going to be two things:
1: Legality
2: Concealability

Legality: Any sort of armored suit that gives you the kind of strength a cybernetic limb does is going to be straight-up illegal, and to make matters worse, hiding it is going to be basically out of the question. Merely possessing something like that is going to launch an investigation into how you even got it, causing you to have to burn your SIN or whatever fake ID your setting uses and going on the run. So yes, exoskeletons and powered armor are fancy doodads that are great, but they are super illegal and getting caught with one gets you into a lot of drek, chummer.

Concealability: I don't just mean "can you hide it" but more "can it hide things". Cyberlimbs are prosthetics and you can't really outlaw prosthetics. Most cyberlimbs are engineered to at least resemble human limbs, even if all they need to function is a basic skeletal-looking structure and some servos. That leaves a lot of empty space you could use for smuggling. Cyberlimbs can also have their stats jacked up to give the user super strength or super speed, and its really hard to test for those things without confiscating the limb and having an expert examine it, so even if those mods are illegal its very hard to get caught with them unless you do something else stupid that gets that investigated as a precaution.

[Eldan]

Storm-of-Snow: Neat, good luck with your career.

On the earlier subject of enhancement and replacement, can you think of any materials that would make a good replacement for skin? I recall some story that have people with their skin replaced as kevlar or such, and wondered if such a thing was possible. Or more, if there was a material that'd be worth having as skin.


Deffers: I need to thank you for the brilliant participation. That was a read worth remembering. This makes me wonder what organs you could replace with mechanical ones, but that's a bit outside your field :smalltongue:.

A question that has come up before which I would like to ask about. Would it be possible to create a robotic exoskeleton where the wearer can add their own strength to the process? That is, if the exoskeleton can lift 500 pounds, and the person can lift 300 pounds, together they can lift 800 pounds? I figure this isn't possible for a couple of reasons, but I'd like to hear it from the horse's mouth, if it's not trouble.

Skin, again, has a lot of functions, biologically. Let's see. It helps with immune functions, obviously. If we just have something hermetically sealed, it that might work. It helps a lot with cooling (sweating). If we lose that, you'd need massive radiators, or some kind of liquid cooling system that vents steam, since your cybernetics will certainly produce heat. It's self repairing, which we'd obviously lose with Kevlar, so you'd probably have to replace it against wear and tear. You'd also lose your sense of touch and sense of temperature, which I guess would be very disorienting. You'd lose the ability to secrete hormones into the air, so people would at the very least find you slightly uncanny, as body odour has a lot to do with what people think of you, at least subconciously. It's self-sterilizing, too, though I guess again, if it's sealed we can forget that and just have our cyborgs shower more often.

[Deffers]

Deffers: I need to thank you for the brilliant participation. That was a read worth remembering. This makes me wonder what organs you could replace with mechanical ones, but that's a bit outside your field :smalltongue:.

A question that has come up before which I would like to ask about. Would it be possible to create a robotic exoskeleton where the wearer can add their own strength to the process? That is, if the exoskeleton can lift 500 pounds, and the person can lift 300 pounds, together they can lift 800 pounds? I figure this isn't possible for a couple of reasons, but I'd like to hear it from the horse's mouth, if it's not trouble.

That's... actually kinda a hard question to answer. Hrm. I mean, let's imagine you're just a pair of arms, for some reason. Shoulder on down. You've got exoskeletons surrounding those arms, too. Assuming DC servomotors, just before the motor reaches its stall torque (the load at which it stalls and stops rotating, funnily enough) you should be able to add your own strength to it-- once it stops moving, it'll be harder to add your strength to it because motors run off a system of magnets, and if it's caught between two magnets in its rotation it's not going to move. If you've got an AC motor, on the other hand, the answer is "kinda." The point of highest torque is apparently around 80% of speed (I'm not sure, because unsurprisingly nobody uses the much more complex-to-control AC motors for this kinda stuff). So you'll need some sort of control algorithm to ensure that that happens. I doubt you'd ever use an AC motor for an exoskeleton, though, because they have next to no torque when they're spinning slowly. You may notice that this is a problem in any mechanical application where you have to reverse directions like a joint would.

Now, for intermediate torques-- torques before your exoskeleton's servos stop being able to move. There's already settings in the existing exoskeletons to essentially only offer partial assistance-- your body does most or some of the work instead of the suit helping you as much as possible. This is because exoskeletons are primarily being today used as a combination of physiotherapy and assisted living when it's not being used by service sector people who have to lift heavy loads (nurses, EMTs, construction workers, nuclear cleanup crews). How the control algorithm for something like that works is beyond me, but I'm guessing the servos in question have got some interesting gearing combined with some really brilliant predictive algorithms to make that possible.


Skin, again, has a lot of functions, biologically. Let's see. It helps with immune functions, obviously. If we just have something hermetically sealed, it that might work. It helps a lot with cooling (sweating). If we lose that, you'd need massive radiators, or some kind of liquid cooling system that vents steam, since your cybernetics will certainly produce heat. It's self repairing, which we'd obviously lose with Kevlar, so you'd probably have to replace it against wear and tear. You'd also lose your sense of touch and sense of temperature, which I guess would be very disorienting. You'd lose the ability to secrete hormones into the air, so people would at the very least find you slightly uncanny, as body odour has a lot to do with what people think of you, at least subconciously. It's self-sterilizing, too, though I guess again, if it's sealed we can forget that and just have our cyborgs shower more often.

Actually, Eldan, the RENet project I mention a few posts back is partially about giving a sense of touch for people with robotic prostheses. Using technologies similar to a touchscreen (yunno, an electrically conductive plating all over the surface of the prosthesis) the neural interfaces can actually send information back to the brain, allowing for you to have a sense of touch. As to whether that also gives you a sense of temperature-- search me. You can find a .gif of someone using their motorized prosthesis to catch a piece of silk easily thanks to their sense of touch.

[Storm_Of_Snow]

Storm-of-Snow: Neat, good luck with your career.

Thanks, and my best wishes to you as well.



On the earlier subject of enhancement and replacement, can you think of any materials that would make a good replacement for skin? I recall some story that have people with their skin replaced as kevlar or such, and wondered if such a thing was possible. Or more, if there was a material that'd be worth having as skin.

First question is why would you want to? Replacing skin due to injury, armour, some other purpose? Something like kevlar would move with the flexing of muscles, but only up to certain thicknesses, but, as Eldan said, if you take away the skin, you lose the ability to sweat in that area, which impacts on your ability to thermoregulate. Depending on what you're using, you're probably also adding thermal insulation, which will compound the effect, and your body runs within fairly close tolerances on temperature as it is.

[Eldan]

Actually, Eldan, the RENet project I mention a few posts back is partially about giving a sense of touch for people with robotic prostheses. Using technologies similar to a touchscreen (yunno, an electrically conductive plating all over the surface of the prosthesis) the neural interfaces can actually send information back to the brain, allowing for you to have a sense of touch. As to whether that also gives you a sense of temperature-- search me. You can find a .gif of someone using their motorized prosthesis to catch a piece of silk easily thanks to their sense of touch.

Ooh, sweet. I didn't know it worked, yet. That said, I was mostly talking about the afforementioned armoured skin. I can't really imagine combining RENet technology with Kevlar skin, yet.

[5ColouredWalker]

Actually, Eldan, the RENet project I mention a few posts back is partially about giving a sense of touch for people with robotic prostheses. Using technologies similar to a touchscreen (yunno, an electrically conductive plating all over the surface of the prosthesis) the neural interfaces can actually send information back to the brain, allowing for you to have a sense of touch. As to whether that also gives you a sense of temperature-- search me. You can find a .gif of someone using their motorized prosthesis to catch a piece of silk easily thanks to their sense of touch.

You'd think tempreture would be easier, we already have machines that can detect temperature, we'd just need to attach them to the nervous system the same way we do touch.

[Grinner]

You'd think tempreture would be easier, we already have machines that can detect temperature, we'd just need to attach them to the nervous system the same way we do touch.

Thermometers are a little trickier, I think. There are technologies, such as piezoelectric meshes, which naturally lend themselves to the purpose of artificial mechanoreception. If my intuition is correct, most of those digital thermometers you can find in pharmacies are designed to work within a fairly narrow band of temperatures. Moreover, they don't really fit prostheses that well. I guess you could try studding the sensors across the surface of a prosthesis, but that would be expensive with probably less than optimal results.

Some kind of mesh which reacts to both heat and pressure would be best.

[NichG]

The brain interface seems to me to be the harder thing to get working there. Or is it something where with some feedback training, the adult human brain is still flexible to rewrite itself?

Are there certain cues in the pattern of stimulus that help the brain identify 'oh, this is supposed to be temperature data; not sure why its coming in over a pressure sensor nerve, but lets just rewire'?

[Grinner]

The brain interface seems to me to be the harder thing to get working there. Or is it something where with some feedback training, the adult human brain is still flexible to rewrite itself?

Something like that. It's been awhile since I've reviewed any of my neurology books, and there are a couple radio programs I need to track down and listen to.

That said, my understanding is that when you're born, the neurons in your brain are very interconnected. At several points in your life, your brain undergoes periods of intense neural pruning, where the excess connections are disposed of, leaving mostly the useful ones. Now, interneuronal connections are constantly shifting, but it's easier for a young child who still has more material to work with to adapt than it is for an adult whose brain is working with a skeleton crew. For this reason, doctors will sometimes recommend that newborns who are manifesting developmental disorders of the brain undergo what I recall is called a hemispherectomy.

So, yes. Adults will just have a harder time of it. If a radio program I heard on stroke recovery is anything to go by, sooner is probably better than later.


Are there certain cues in the pattern of stimulus that help the brain identify 'oh, this is supposed to be temperature data; not sure why its coming in over a pressure sensor nerve, but lets just rewire'?

Good question. I haven't an inkling how the low-level mechanics work here. I'd assume the signals are undifferentiated, but I don't really know.

The exact translation of neural signals into sensations is actually something which really bugs me sometimes. It's just so weird. I can feel my hand touch something in a particular point in space at that point in space, but I DON'T KNOW HOW I DO IT!!!

[Broken Twin]

1. Legal Reasons: The government has little reason to want what are essentially walking tanks to be legal for civilians to own without a license at the bare minimum.
2. Social Reasons: Exoskeletons are big and bulky. You don't wear them in polite company.
3. Power Reasons: Exoskeletons would require a much larger power source to operate for a similar amount of time.
4. Price Reasons: In case of dismemberment, prosthetic limbs are covered by your health care plan.

[Deffers]

The brain interface seems to me to be the harder thing to get working there. Or is it something where with some feedback training, the adult human brain is still flexible to rewrite itself?

Are there certain cues in the pattern of stimulus that help the brain identify 'oh, this is supposed to be temperature data; not sure why its coming in over a pressure sensor nerve, but lets just rewire'?

I'm not sure that the brain really needs to differentiate. I mean, if the touch receptors already work, either we can isolate the nerves in question with sufficient accuracy or the brain's smart enough to figure it out. Either that or maybe the nerves fire in different ways in response to different stimuli.

The problem, BTW, Broken Twin, with the social and legal reasons you've posted is that an exoskeleton is just a bunch of EEG machines and motors, deep down. Not stuff you wanna ban in a cyberpunk future. And as for bulk-- they're actually quite slim already. Seriously, check out the HAL exoskeletons sometime (and marvel at the cojones necessary to name your robotics company CYBERDYNE ON PURPOSE).

[SpoonR]

Which brings us to the difficult question... how do we get our cyberpunk dystopia when exoskeletons want to ruin the fun?


To be sure, you want cyberpunk without exoskeletons (at least for combat)?

My first thought is go biopunk. Basically, Exo and Cyber both turned out to be dead ends, mainly because of power supply. Instead, why not use biology? Everything already runs on your bodies energy supply, so you can improve areas without that problem. Say replace your muscles with souped up chimpanzee. Mix in genes for cat or octopus eyes to get lowlight & better focusing. Fiddle with adrenalin and general hormones. Potential complication/hook - medicine can delay the body rejecting weird implants, but can't stop rejection. So getting implants turns you into a timebomb, a la a Rifts Juicer.

Second idea is that cyber is just better, but most people don't want to hack off limbs just for that. So, you recruit people with blindness, crippled leg, brittle bones like you suggested. Cyber them and you have people who owe you tons of money, have a sort of 'honor debt' because you improved their quality of life, and are probably poor because of work disability before getting cybered. As long as cyber is equal or slightly better than exoskeletons, you have a captive population of runners.

Current exoskeleton & cyber tech. AFAIK, various exoskeletons have been researched. The fundamental problem now is inventing a battery or small power plant so your Exo isn't trailing a mile of power cord. On the cyber side, they have crude brain interfaces & low res cyber "eye".

[ghanjrho]

A third alternative to Cyberlimbs vs Exoskeletons is more general Cyber/Bioware. Take Shadowrun for example. Basic cyber like muscle replacements, wired reflexes and bone reinforcements. This severely reduces the initial costs of cybering up, while also more evenly distributing the benefits. This leaves cyberlimbs for the unfortunate and the dedicated.

As for acceptance of implants/prosthetics in general, the movement will start for the public when the wetware is the limiting factor. When cybereyes become capable of 20/20 vision (and natural appearance) is when people will start making the switch. When they reach 20/10, it will be more common than not. When it reaches the very limits of the optic nerve to transmit/the visual cortex to interpret, is when having natural eyes will be stigmatized. And that's not even including the waves of people with poor eyesight will upgrade even earlier.

[Cluedrew]

Due to a combination of busyness in real life and not being entirely sure how to reply to a reply of my last post here. That being this one:


I understood him perfectly, and he knows it, and I was able to discern and point out the specific area of our seeming disagreement. Did you not understand my previous post, and also not understand his last two posts? Because that ought to be clear.

"]As I discussed before, current medical technology is not at all like cyberpunk prosthetic limbs, which have the ability to do stuff like communicate a sense of touch. Problems with current medical technology are not the same problems that cyberpunk cybernetic limbs share.

Current medical tech is not relevant to cyberpunk.

It's like you're discussing how people feel about a glass eye in a discussion about cyberware eyes. The difference is that a cyberware eye allows you to see.What we have here is a breakdown in communication. I'm not sure which side it happened but although it is technically possible you understood me perfectly I certainly don't know that. On my end right now you seem to be ignoring my agreement in favour of "technology will advance far enough that it will work how I say so", which doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Feel free to reply and prove me wrong, in fact the reason I say this is to give you the opportunity to do so.


Cluedrew: The difficult with enhancing the existing body, is you need to change a lot of stuff to get a macro effect.I agree, in fact that is one of the reasons I am against the whole super-powered mechanical limb thing. When you lift something it isn't just your arm doing the work (and certainly not just your hand and elbow) but you back, your hip and your legs. In fact with the exception of your head and neck very little of your body isn't directly involved. I guess to me I think argumentations seem like a more natural way to do so rather than just replacing the arm.

By the way I'm glad you liked my spiel on the level of technology in cyberpunk, spent a lot of time trying to get that right.

There has also been some talk about "biowear" which I disagree with on the basis that... cyberpunk is kind of about the 'cyber' (computers, machines and electronics) as opposed to genetic engineering. That has its place too but not really as a focus. Is "biopunk" a thing? I've heard of clockpunk as a variant of steampunk.

[Grinner]

There has also been some talk about "biowear" which I disagree with on the basis that... cyberpunk is kind of about the 'cyber' (computers, machines and electronics) as opposed to genetic engineering. That has its place too but not really as a focus. Is "biopunk" a thing? I've heard of clockpunk as a variant of steampunk.

Allegedly, yes. From my limited reading of it, though, I'm of the opinion that the distinction is insignificant.

[Milo v3]

Is "biopunk" a thing?
Bioshock (Game), Splice (Movie) and Twig (Literature) are some examples of biopunk.

[Mr. Mask]

I would like to see some really hard scifi of biopunk. See what kind of stuff you might be able to do. What's Twig like?



Snow Storm: I think it was for added combat armour for soldiers bred for war, in the setting.


Deffers: Thanks for answering that question. It makes sense when you mention physiotherapy, for assistant exoskeletons. That would mean a cyborg in an exoskeleton would be stronger than a human in the same exoskeleton, for what that's worth. Depending on the strength of the robotics, it could be worth an amount.



One idea that comes to mind is that most fully body cyborgs are old people who were near to death, and essentially get an extension on life with a new, strong, young body, albeit it an mainly artificial one. That could be interesting, though it's hard to justify the brain lasting that much longer in an artificial body I'd figure.

[Deffers]

Deffers: Thanks for answering that question. It makes sense when you mention physiotherapy, for assistant exoskeletons. That would mean a cyborg in an exoskeleton would be stronger than a human in the same exoskeleton, for what that's worth. Depending on the strength of the robotics, it could be worth an amount.



One idea that comes to mind is that most fully body cyborgs are old people who were near to death, and essentially get an extension on life with a new, strong, young body, albeit it an mainly artificial one. That could be interesting, though it's hard to justify the brain lasting that much longer in an artificial body I'd figure.

Right now we've managed to put rat brains in robot bodies and they live for a couple days. Extrapolate that out into a cyberpunk future and you could probably last at least a couple years, maybe a decade. If you're 85 and dying of lung cancer, spending even one or two years as a twenty year old who can't get tired is probably a helluva deal.

EDIT: Well, some of a rat brain, so far. Helps with pathing, what with neurons being able to learn and grow, etc. But they keep adding more neurons, which is nice. They've also used leech brains.

EDIT2: They managed to use a whole lamprey eel brain one time, though. As well as a moth's brain, but that one was interesting because the thing was dead already. Probably couldn't do that with a real human.

[Mr. Mask]

EDIT: Well, some of a rat brain, so far. Helps with pathing, what with neurons being able to learn and grow, etc. But they keep adding more neurons, which is nice. They've also used leech brains.

EDIT2: They managed to use a whole lamprey eel brain one time, though. As well as a moth's brain, but that one was interesting because the thing was dead already. Probably couldn't do that with a real human.



, so far. Helps with pathing, what with neurons being able to learn and grow, etc. But they keep adding more neurons, which is nice. They've also used l

whole lamprey eel brain one time, though. As well as a moth's brain, but that one was interesting because the thing was dead already. Probably couldn'



As well as a moth's brain, but that one was interesting because the thing was dead already.




but that one was interesting because the thing was dead already.




was dead already.



was dead already.





d e a d a L r e a d y.
..................................


....Necro zombie cyborgs.....

[Cluedrew]

....Necro zombie cyborgs.....AKA: This can only end in success.

Zombie-punk anyone? Or want to just switch to post-apocalypse?

[Mr. Mask]

There are dozens of ways you can do that which are interesting. My way of saying it was better, though....

If you die, they just resurrect you as a cyborg. Of course, when that becomes consistently doable with humans, you could theoretically just resurrect them and put them in a cloned body. You'd need some way around that pesky inconvient convenience.

You could have them go or be partially crazy, or have it that they start out normal but it starts to drive them mad, and/or either way you can focus on the aspect of literally starting a new life, since you just died.

[barnmaddo]

Downsides of Exoskeletons:
1) There will be a learning curve. Stuff like playing catch (with arms that are longer/faster/slower/wider ect...) will take practice. Learning a single skill might not take long, but we use our bodies thousands of different ways without even thinking about it.
2) Innocuous Stuff like scratching your nose could seriously injure you. Currently there's a balance between how strong our muscles are, and how tough skin and bone is.
3) It depends on the use case, but many times it might be better to just have a remote controlled humanoid robot. Would probably cost about the same.
4) Physical strength isn't a huge advantage these days. Sure, if I want to murder someone it could be useful, but a gun would be even better, and either way the hardest part is getting away with it. You might use an exoskeleton when unloading a truck, but it would just be a hassle if you're out getting a drink or working in an office.
5) You'd certainly draw a lot of attention just walking down the street in one.

A bit off topic, but Blindsight (Firewall) and it's sequel Echopraxia by Peter Watts were a good high tech dystopia series. Technology had advanced to the point base-line humans were no longer useful. It was only the humans who were extensively modified with implants and prosthesis that could still be relevant.

[Nifft]

Due to a combination of busyness in real life and not being entirely sure how to reply to a reply of my last post here. That being this one:

What we have here is a breakdown in communication. I'm not sure which side it happened but although it is technically possible you understood me perfectly I certainly don't know that. On my end right now you seem to be ignoring my agreement in favour of "technology will advance far enough that it will work how I say so", which doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Feel free to reply and prove me wrong, in fact the reason I say this is to give you the opportunity to do so. What I'm saying is that the Cyberpunk genre has certain technological implications.

They're not ~my~ say-so, they're the genre's say-so.

You don't get to ignore those technological conceits, even if they are not based on real-world tech.

If you are unsure why I'm using Cyberpunk genre conceits: it's because this is a Cyberpunk thread, with Cyberpunk in the title and the OP.

I do hope this helps with the communication issue you are having.

[Mr. Mask]

I don't think Cluedrew has described ideas outside of the cyberpunk genre.

[Cluedrew]

To Nifft: I think it does actually. You see I'm very loose with some parts of a gene's standards. For instance ShadowRun has magic and in most contexts I wouldn't even bother qualifying it as "cyberpunk/fantasy", I would just say "cyberpunk" in most conversations. That being said I have tried to stay close to "pure" cyberpunk. Some people (Mr. Mask) seem to think I have, others (you/Nifft) disagree so part of that seems to be opinion.

Unless we want to hammer out a set of standards about the level of advancements is every field of study, the applications there of, the resulting technologies and devices, the availability and costs of each and how each is commonly used is society. However that seems to be excessive.

As for zombie cyborgs, it is actually fairly reasonable without getting into... less ShadowRun and more Eclipse Phase. For instance when someone "dies" (let's say there heart stops) they aren't necessary dead yet. Because all there cells, including the brain cells, are still going and it takes time (not a lot of time) for them to die and become brain dead. With freezing you can (in theory) keep that for happening for a long time. Nanobots might be able to repair damage to cells without understanding how they link together, hence avoiding digitization of the mind or something like that. I feel that is a bit to much for cyberpunk.

So you could make it work, not sure if you would want to but you can.

[Nifft]

The reason is, and this is the thing I think most people are missing, artificial limbs aren't actually that great. In addition the problems are such that to fix them completely it will likely (not definitely) that it will require "transhuminisum" levels of technology, which is far beyond most cyberpunk settings. Until we reach that level losing your arm and getting a prosthetic is still a very real loss.

Except by amputees. Err, well at the level of modern prosthetics (again, I'm assuming a near-future level of technology, without hand wave rapid advancement). Not in all situations of course, for example any situation that requires "grip" will usually necessitate the use of an artificial arm. But for general tasks often enough whatever is left and even if it isn't being free of the very heavy and uncomfortable add on is usually worth it. Less so for leg amputees (...)


I should also clarify that "near-future" here does not mean next year, or even a decade from now. It is about 30-50 years, give or take however much you want, the number of years isn't actually important. Maybe I should use a different term for it, but it usually works. I put cyberpunk at a level where technological advancement has, at most, just started to create fundamental shifts, society hasn't settled back down yet. So yes prosthetics would be better than they are today, but I don't think they would be approaching seamless replacements yet.


To Nifft: I think it does actually. You see I'm very loose with some parts of a gene's standards.

Here's what I think your point is: Observations about real-world prosthetics are relevant to Cyberpunk games because the Cyberpunk genre may include one (or more) setting in which real-world prosthetics are the limit of commercially available technology.

If that's your point, then this is a thing which we can actually go out and discover.

So, here's where you can definitively win a point: can you find ONE GAME which advertises itself as "cyberpunk" and limits prosthetic limbs to current real-world prosthetic technology, and does not include stuff like a direct neural interface for a sense of touch (for example)?

THAT GUY rule #1: The game must have existed before this conversation started.
THAT GUY rule #2: Generic systems like GURPS which have both Cyberpunk and non-Cyberpunk rule sets do not count as one game if you pick and choose rules from different books. The whole Cyberpunk sourcebook, if there is one, would be the unit of measure.

Finally, I think you're trying to draw a line where no line is possible, because I think many Cyberpunk works include a large number of Transhumanist themes. Ghost in the Shell is one example of a literary work which has many Transhumanist themes and is a central set member in the Cyberpunk category, and Eclipse Phase is a game which can be played as Cyberpunk and which has even more focus on Transhumanist themes.

So, when you say this:

that it will require "transhuminisum" levels of technology, which is far beyond most cyberpunk settings ... I think you are absolutely and provably wrong. For proof, you can list the Cyberpunk settings which do NOT have such "transhumanism" levels of technology, and I'll list the ones which do. We can see which list is longer, and we'll be able to know what "most cyberpunk settings" actually do.

[Milo v3]

All I know is that my Cyberpunk 2020 book has far better than near-future prosthetics despite it's name, and you can't get much more iconic cyberpunk than Cyberpunk itself.

[Mr. Mask]

Nifft: Cluedrew didn't say modern prosthetics. He said near-future prosthetics. So take the best stuff possible today, and add about 50 years.

Transhumanist technologies would require the cybernetics to be better than human flesh without drawbacks, whereas many definitive examples of cyberpunk are interesting because of the drawbacks of wetware. Shadowrun takes away your humanity/sanity as you replace pieces, several other cyberpunk works also have cyborgs similarly going mad or inhuman, Full Metal Alchemist goes into the little quirks that are problematic with a metal arm, and even Ghost in the shell features some drawbacks (a whole episode was dedicated to a girl living with the issues of being put into a cyborg body from infancy). Cyberpunk needs some dilemma as to why not everyone upgrades their parts, or else it wouldn't be cyberpunk, it'd just be robot anime.

[Cluedrew]

To Nifft: You're close, it might be more accurate to say I think observations about real-world prosthetics are relevant because it is always good to have a familiarity with real world versions, even if what is in the story doesn't always keep to that and many cyberpunk settings (I had a post about this earlier) are not so advanced that real world technology has no baring on what can be done. So even if new better technology, including prosthetics, has been invented it is often still only pushing the currant limits outwards a bit, not effectively removing them.

More importantly you argument about me providing a game that does this I think highlights what may actually be the real root of our disagreement (or it may go even deeper than this). Our approaches to this question are different. You are basing you arguments on the existing conventions, what is done commonly is most important but anything done at all carries some weight. I tend to ignore a lot of those, not because this is a better approach but because I love fiddling with conventions. Before you say "then it is not cyberpunk" I do and am trying to stick to what I consider to be a few important fundamentals.

In order:

Dystopian Society: Also corporations have to play some major roll in why life is terrible. To me this one is non-negotiable, without this the story merely has cyberpunk elements in the story, it is not cyberpunk.
Sci-fi/Futuristic: It is a type of sci-fi, dealing with both advances in technology (although not always a lot) and possible advancements of society.
Information Technology: Computers and the internet play large role, often being the focus.
Missing Sci-fi Elements: Regular interaction with aliens, faster than light travel, interplanetary travel, non-physical-projectile weapons and so on. In short: near future.

In fact I'll even give you that it might be true that the majority of cyberpunk settings and stories include transhuminisum elements. I for one don't want to have to count them. It isn't true of my experience with cyberpunk but that is hardly complete. For instance I know next to nothing of Ghost in the Shell, my iconic cyberpunk is Snow Crash. There is some transdoginisum in that, but that is about it.

The point is that if you follow from these fundamentals nothing about cyberpunk requires transhumanisium. As I hinted at before I feel some of them (1 & 4) actually discourage them so no transhuminisum is my default. More importantly it is allowed and so this discussion which is not about any established setting or story can use that angle. In fact lets go back to the original question.


how do we get our cyberpunk dystopia when exoskeletons want to ruin the fun?A lot of answers boiled down to "cybernetics are awesome". Mine argued for the use of cybernetics vs. exoskeletons as a symbol of those the society favours and those it abandons. To back this up I stated that modern prosthetics and, given the rate of development, those of a near future society would realistically not be that awesome.

If you are arguing that cybernetics in cyberpunk have to be awesome because the usually (or even always) are... I'm going to disagree with you on that. Not all cyberpunk uses advanced cybernetics and not all those do justify them very well.


THAT GUY rule #1: The game must have existed before this conversation started.I wouldn't do that. Probably. Maybe. If I had time. OK I considered it briefly, but that would be cheap and even I am not that dedicated. Although it is true I can't think of any cyberpunk game has lets than stellar prosthetics but I think that is because they make good power-ups. OK, its been about 3 hours. I'm done.

[Segev]

I think the thing being missed here is that cybernetics have a place for those who have lost or malformed limbs. Even in a world with exoskeletons, you will have people born with defects or who suffer amputations (accidental or medically necessary). Cybernetic replacement limbs will definitely be of interest to them. As will cybernetic replacement organs for people suffering from damaged or destroyed ones.

Cybernetics of the wholly-internal sort, too, have their advantages in subtlety. While yes, secured facilities may well have metal detectors and the like which would detect your enhanced arm and the hidden pneumatic crossbow in your leg, you won't get stopped on the street for having them because people won't usually detect it.

Because they're always a part of you, as well, implants generally won't be taken away, nor something you're "caught without." From a real standpoint, that may not be as big an advantage as it sounds like (since you could theoretically carry your exoskeleton everywhere except where you don't want it, while your implants can't be left behind if you want them gone for a bit), but there is something on the social engineering scale about how you can justify taking something you literally can't put down that you might be told to leave behind if you could.

Wholly internal implants that enhance vision, cognition, memory, or provide non-human abilities like perfect video recall would also be convenient not to have to leave behind for any reason.

So there's still room for implant-based cyberware in a setting with highly-advanced exosuit technology.

[ImNotTrevor]

*The screen flickers on, a man with glasses and a nice suit stands in a prostine white studio. A floating hologram of the Pyramid Technical Industries logo spins in the air behind him. He begins to speak.*

"Why have an implant when you can just buy an exosuit?"

This is a question we here at Pyramid Bio-Technologies hear a lot.

My name is Guy Montague, and today I'll be explaining why PBT's advanced cyberware is the answer to your problems.

Exosuits have one major inconvenience that you almost can't avoid: They are clunky and time-consuming to put on and remove, and you have to take them everywhere you go. Talk about luggage fees!
*Infomercial-grade footage of someone lugging themselves into an exosuit and then trying to shove one into a suitcase*

Even top-of-the line exosuits like this Dynamene Industries TR-341 lack true neural interface. While you may be able to control the limbs with your mind, you will simply never have the tactile ability to tell the difference between burlap and silk with the touch of a fingertip.
*blindfolded man in exosuit touches both and shrugs"
Not to mention the high-risk surgery needed to install a shunt that can become a real health risk over time!
*Footage of a mugger plugging something into a shunt and laughing while they take their victim's wallet*


With PBT's line of cyberware, we can give you abilities mankind has dreamt about for ages. And with our new line of modular enhancements, upgrading has never been more convenient.
*Footage of someone removing a cyberfinger and putting on a different one.*

Lets look at some of our incredible options!

The Aqualung 4200 allows humans to breathe both air and water without the use of an airtank. Lets see an exposuit match that!

With our new modular leg attachments, you can easily attach these underwater propulsion jets for your swim, and simply take them off when your done with all the ease of your favorite slippers.

Need a new hairstyle that stands out? Try our latest cosmetic implant: The Holostyler.
*A bald man behind Guy suddenly has a bright-pink vector hologram mohawk, and gives a thumbs-up."

To continue to our other products, please consult the menu below.

*Screen flickers and fades out*

+++++++++

This came to me. Cybernetics are for rich folks with money to burn on ridiculous things. Or pseudo-criminal shadowrunners with lots of illicit cash.

Prosthetics are for poor factory workers who were to stupid to get a job where their arms would be safe from sawblades.

Exosuits are for middleclass people who want to seem cool. Or people who work industrial. Or both.

There you have it. A solution to make everyone happy.

[Mr. Mask]

Segev: Well, I was thinking more or the problem of the idea of cyber-limbs granting enhanced combat ability. Unless your spine and most of your skeleton is replaced, a robot arm won't give you super strength. You can't punch super hard or lift more, as this'd put strain on your human skeleton. So people might have prosthetics more commonly than today, but most people won't care about prosthetics any more than they do now, except maybe for the case of hidden weapons inside of artificial limbs. And even with substantial improvements, no one is going to cut their arm off to get a robot one any more than they do now (well, a little more if wetware has better PR by then).

[ImNotTrevor]

If we have the tech to connect your cyberlimbs to your brain, we have the tech to make a new spine.

And "Super Strength" has a lot of meanings. My spine has nothing to do with me crushing a brick with my cyberhand, and it's primarily the ribs that prevent me from punching a hole through a wall.
Of course, lifting a car overhead might be more possible than you think....


http://listverse.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/John+balanced+a+Mini+car+weighing+a+total+of+159.j pg

So I don't think improvements via cyberlimbs are an insane pipe dream.

[Mr. Mask]

Cool trick. The car is stripped down, it weighs just under 300 pounds. Crushing a brick in your hand would also be a pretty cool trick.

I can't say I know exactly how difficult skeleton or spine replacement surgery is. I would figure a few months of recovery between several ten hour surgical procedures. You might need to remain paralysed in the hospital for a while, if the spine replacement can't be done in one session. You could afford several military grade exosuits for the cost of that surgery, which would be easier to acquire illegally and cover up (if you have a military-grade cybernetic spine put in, it'd be easy to look up your medical records and mark you as a dangerous suspect).

[Nifft]

You are basing you arguments on the existing conventions, what is done commonly is most important but anything done at all carries some weight. I tend to ignore a lot of those, not because this is a better approach but because I love fiddling with conventions. Before you say "then it is not cyberpunk" I do and am trying to stick to what I consider to be a few important fundamentals. Well, you may be doing something with a dystopian future, but if you're ripping out chunks of the genre then you might not be in the genre any more.

That's okay. You're not required to stay in the Cyberpunk sandbox.

But if you use the word Cyberpunk, then it doesn't mean whatever you feel like playing. It means what is commonly done in the publications which are central set members to the genre.

There's a lot of cool sci-fi which is not Cyberpunk, and that's fine.


In fact I'll even give you that it might be true that the majority of cyberpunk settings and stories include transhuminisum elements. I for one don't want to have to count them. It isn't true of my experience with cyberpunk but that is hardly complete. For instance I know next to nothing of Ghost in the Shell, my iconic cyberpunk is Snow Crash. There is some transdoginisum in that, but that is about it. That's the one where the space-virus (infomorph) invades the brains of smart people, right? I think that's what Snow Crash meant, an information virus which propagates by infecting human brains using visuals like old CRT static ("Snow") as its vector.

That's the book, right? It's the title so I think I've got the correct book.


The point is that if you follow from these fundamentals nothing about cyberpunk requires transhumanisium.
Well, like I said regarding GURPS and the like, I'm explicitly prohibiting cutting out half the book when discussing the definition of the genre.

If you cut out MOST OF the tropes in Cyberpunk, then sure you can say whatever you want, because there's hardly anything left.

But I don't find that a satisfying rhetorical technique.

IMHO it's more honest to say that you play a sci-fi game which uses some Cyberpunk elements (but is not in fact Cyberpunk). And that's fine.

[Mr. Mask]

A genre does not require you to include all tropes associated with that genre. Unless it's romance.

[Nifft]

A genre does not require you to include all tropes associated with that genre. Unless it's romance.

Directly contradicting half the core themes of the genre does in fact mean you're not in the genre.

As an aside, over on TVTropes, I saw that Snow Crash is listed as "Post-Cyberpunk", which is to say it's not listed as Cyberpunk.

[Milo v3]

A genre does not require you to include all tropes associated with that genre.

It does require you use or at least subvert the core tropes associated with the genre. Having a cyberpunk setting where the prosthetics are only slightly better than modern day doesn't really really fit cyberpunk, unless the primary focus of the setting is on how it's subverting the tropes of the genre.

[Mr. Mask]

Nifft: "Directly contradicting half the core themes of the genre does in fact mean you're not in the genre."

That would be a deconstruction.

"As an aside, over on TVTropes, I saw that Snow Crash is listed as "Post-Cyberpunk", which is to say it's not listed as Cyberpunk."

What is a post-cyberpunk? It sounds like a cyberpunk sub-genre.

[Nifft]

That would be a deconstruction. Sorry, but no. Deconstruction (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deconstruction) actually means something, and what it means is NOT just flat-out ignoring half of a genre if it's inconvenient to your poorly researched opinion.


What is a post-cyberpunk? A horrible place where people can't ask google to define words they don't know.


It sounds like a cyberpunk sub-genre. C'mon. This is borderline bad-faith debate.

Unless you honestly think Post-Structuralism is a kind of Structuralism, and you honestly think Post-War is a kind of war, and you honestly think Post-Impressionism is just another kind of Impressionism...

[Mr. Mask]

Well, you're downright unpleasant.

"Sorry, but no. Deconstruction actually means something, and what it means is NOT just flat-out ignoring half of a genre if it's inconvenient to your poorly researched opinion."

"Directly contradicting half the core themes of the genre does in fact mean you're not in the genre."

You happily change the context to suit whatever it is you say.


"A horrible place where people can't ask google to define words they don't know."

When you put it that way, google would be a much better use of my time.

[Nifft]

Well, you're downright unpleasant.
This is how you respond to people who disagree with you and can back up their points.

You go right for the personal insult.

That says more about you than me.


When you put it that way, google would be a much better use of my time.
Certainly better than asking someone else to do your research, or trying to debate without knowing the subject matter.

Both of those are a waste of several people's time, including (but not limited to) your own.

[Mr. Mask]

"This is how you respond to people who disagree with you and can back up their points.

You go right for the personal insult.

That says more about you than me."


"Certainly better than asking someone else to do your research, or trying to debate without knowing the subject matter."

Thank you for confirming you were insulting me earlier with your statements about ignorance and lacking research. Hypocrisy suits you.




What if you played up the aspect of the environment becoming toxic? Something that requires you to physically alter people to a dramatic extent in order for them to function in the environment. You could theoretically just go to atmopheric suits and rooms, but if you're going to spend your whole life in those conditions (and possibly have to work in them), then cybernetic alteration may seem more reasonable.

[Almarck]

... So, uh this thread lead me to throw my hat in, borrowing from a slightly different setting that does have lots of cyberpunk influence.


http://vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/warframe/images/d/dd/GrineerProsecutor.png/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/200?cb=20140415221134&format=webp

Meet the Grineer: A degenerated clone whose body is putrid and diseased upon "birth" that cybernetics and extensive organ replacement are necessary to make them survive. And then they stick them in space capable powered armor. And this guy above is just the among the "light" infantry models. The big stuff is beefier.

They marry powered armor and cybernetics together... though to such a degree, it kinda blurs the line since they can't remove it ever.

In the context of a traditonal cyberpunk dystopia, this would be the equivalent of an endtier full body replacement cyborg with really good combat armor welded directly.



But for our purposes, this does help us plan out something.
A corporation makes lots of clones for a slave workforce, lots and lots of clones with degenerate limbs and failing organs that they can't survive birth.

The company that makes them could buy an exosuit for the limbs, but not all clones need one and such would be obtrusive. Even then, they've got so many internal organ issues that most market grade exosuits wouldn't be of any value keeping them alive since they'd fail to breathe. So, while installing all of the internal organs, they get all extremities to be installed upon birth. As all of them are clones, if any one dies, they just take his parts and slap him onto someone else. no problem.

This makes an interesting backstory for a "runner" if you ask me.

[Mr. Mask]

It does require some pretty extensive bodily damage for the clones, but it's nevertheless a great way of handling the need for cybernetics. Would work well in the toxic environment idea.

[Cluedrew]

Today I have places to go and things to do so I'm going to whip this off quickly, I might make some misspeaks as a result so please: remain calm.

One:
To Mr. Mask; Post-Cyberpunk: After cyberpunk, a setting where society has progressed out of cyberpunk (or the corporate dystopia part). Some posts ago I described cyberpunk as a society experiencing growing pains and where technology didn't really help? Well by that metric post-cyberpunk has grown ant its technology is actually helpful. (I wouldn't count Snow Crash as this by the way.)

Two:
To Nifft; there is a significant difference between tweaking with some features of a gene and "ignoring half of it". Elements of genes can roughly be divided into two groups: first fundamentals which are what make a gene what it is. Each gene has about 2-3 fundamentals, in fact looking back the fourth fundamental for cyberpunk is actually just some of the most prominent conventions. Speaking of which conventions form the second group and they are just things usually associated with the gene. Including a certain number of them can be important for maintaining familiarity and the proper "feel" but it is not important which ones nor at a high level it is necessary.

Three:
There are no formal cut offs for when something stops being a member of a gene. You said it yourself "your trying to trying to draw lines where none are possible". However in my experience when we can agree that something is not part of a gene it is because one of the fundamentals changed. Sometimes changing enough of the conventions will also have that effect, for instance the difference between "a modern setting with magic" and "urban fantasy" is the inclusion of a lot of fantasy's conventions. But then that sort of becomes a fundamental for urban fantasy.

Four:
Defining a gene by the most prominent works is not invalid, but it is not a useful definition in many cases. For instance lets say back when Lord of the Rings came out people said "yes, this is now fantasy" and then when The Chronicles of Narina came out people would look and it and say "no, that is not fantasy". Why? Because it is not Lord of the Rings, which in our much simplified example is the only existing example of a fantasy work. Now we have a much larger body of work to draw on but you still have to allow some "tweaking" otherwise the gene can't "grow" because nothing that is anything more than a rehash of something already there.

Five:
... Did I have a fifth point? Oh yes, Nifft that's the one, the Snow Crash book, with the weird static virus. As I recall it wasn't alive though just some sort of digital weapon.

I think that is everything.

[Mr. Mask]

Interesting thought. You could have a cyberpunk setting with intelligent machines, where the popularity of cyberization is driven by the robots who want to better assimilate the humans. You could also have elements of say, the robot Olympics, where humans are allowed to compete but never win--unless they augment themselves.


One:
To Mr. Mask; Post-Cyberpunk: After cyberpunk, a setting where society has progressed out of cyberpunk (or the corporate dystopia part). Some posts ago I described cyberpunk as a society experiencing growing pains and where technology didn't really help? Well by that metric post-cyberpunk has grown ant its technology is actually helpful. (I wouldn't count Snow Crash as this by the way.) Thank you Cluedrew.

That genre label seems pretty useless to me. You could say Starwars was post-cyberpunk, considering its two major cybernetic characters. But without the elements of the drawbacks and advantages of cybernetics and slums, you might as well call it a post-medieval or post-modern work. The genre could call itself a more optimistic cyberpunk. Ghost in the Shell, where there is more emphasis on organization and powerful cybernetics than there is on the drawbacks of it and abject poverty.

[Cluedrew]

Genre... not gene, anyways.

You may be right Mr. Mask on the post-cyberpunk label. The other way I have heard it described is "cyberpunk without the punk", as it removes the first fundamental (of my list at least) of cyberpunk, the corporate dystopia. Now I created a genre label for a story I wrote once that was not quite cyberpunk. I called it "verge-cyberpunk". Now that was before I had heard of post-cyberpunk and there a lot of similarities between the two put the main difference is that verge- was a society that could have been a dystopia while post- is a society that had been a dystopia, and recently to. Like post-apocalyptic for the post- only really applies if it that bit of history is pretty significant to the currant understanding of the world's state. This is for instance something Star Wars lacks (it also lacks the internet).

Although I don't have a lot of experience with post-cyberpunk, in fact I have never seen a story that hit me over the head with how post-cyberpunk it was.

[Mr. Mask]

The funny thing is, while post-apocalyptic is really interesting to see how you survive the destruction, post-cyberpunk would basically be, "hey, remember when there was lots of conflict and everything was interesting?" "Yeah," Joe says, drinking from his cyber-straw, "I remember." It sounds like a Happily Ever After genre, where you continue the story after the thematic conflicts have been solved, to do something probably unrelated to the original genre.

That being said, Verge-Cyberpunk sounds interesting to me. For some reason, it gave me the image of some kind of Ghibli version of cyberpunk, where at the same time as having some grand adventure, you have these wonderfully elaborate cybernetic arms and technology that allow the characters to do interesting things. You could also go into the drawbacks they cause to make the story more dramatic, and a little sad. Of course, while it gives me that image, you could easily have a story about gritty sailors during world war 2, where both sides are making use of cybernetics. It's simply removing the dystopia element so you can graft the drama of cybernetics onto other genres. Which sounds much more flexible and interesting to me.

[Segev]

Technically, a deconstruction plays the tropes to a T on the face of it, but then doesn't accept the genre conventions that result in ignoring unpleasant questions. It looks at the consequences - usually with a focus on the negative - of "what if this REALLY happened?"

A deconstruction of a magical girl show, then, deals with teenaged girls undergoing even more stress than normal teenagerhood brings, up to and including PTSD and the very real possibility of their death and the deaths of their friends. Even with magic to fix physical crippling, the emotional stresses will be explored much more deeply, and the notion that the parents just don't notice will be dealt with more realistically - whether it's due to truly neglectful parents (with its own consequences), magical mind alteration (which will also have its potentials fully explored, usually in creepy to horrifying ways), or parents who genuinely notice and act like real, concerned parents (and all the trouble and trauma that can cause for the magical girl AND her family).

A deconstruction of cyberpunk would be a little trickier, because in some ways cyberpunk is already a deconstruction of the transhuman "golden future" fiction. But the ways to do it would be to examine the underlying assumptions about corporations and their motives. A lot of cyberpunk, like other subtle and not-so-subtle "message" genres (I'm looking at you, Captain Planet, which is practically your own genre of eco-activist heroics), have conventions that can be deconstructed if you just think about them.

In fact, to some degree, Freefall (the web comic) is a deconstruction of some of the corporate genre conventions. Not all, but some.

Cyberpunk deconstruction would not look at the problems of cybernetics; those are actually part OF the genre. Instead, it would examine the notion that corporations hire thugs to commit clandestine warfare against other corporations. It would look at the real drives of corporations (to make money) and deconstruct the often silly genre conventions about HOW that money is made (much like in Captain Planet, it often seems like a cyberpunk corporation can generate money spontaneously by committing sufficient acts of evil).

It would examine the HARM done by "shadowrunners" to society, not just to "the powers that be." It would, actually and ironically, bring in trappings of slice-of-life genres like the Family Dramady the High School SitCom, not because those don't have silly conventions of their own, but because showing how people's lives are impacted by losses of the technologies and by the "revolutionary freedom fighting." It would examine the up sides to whatever societal norms there are, showing WHY they exist. And, where they make no sense, it would either replace them or demonstrate their failures are endemic, not something that needs to be "revolted" against.

In a sense, a deconstruction of cyberpunk would share actual cyberpunk's sense of futility, but not because nothing changes...instead because it doesn't MATTER what the traditional cyberpunk heroes are doing. The system wouldn't stand without their interference, either, and may not even be what they think it is.

It's a harder thing to deconstruct, though, because in some strange ways, cyberpunk adheres to more cultural sacred cows of self-delusion than other genres. The "inherently evil corporation," the "faceless business drone," the endemic corruption and utterly sheep-like nature of the populace are all things that we tend to accept on a deeper level than mere genre convention; we look at cyberpunk and think we're seeing brilliant subversive social commentary, when really we're seeing our own prejudices fed back to us and confirmed for us.

I suppose a true deconstruction of it, then, would be to take all the "I'm different, unlike all you conformists!" notions that it's about...and showing that the true conformity in the setting is the very notion that you're unique and different. That the "subversive" views are actually the mainstream ones, and the true rebels are the few people who actually embody positive aspects of the supposed majority culture. Or, rather, that they're the few HONEST ones who acknowledge what everybody's doing. "I'm different, because I SEE that I'm part of a machine and talk about fighting against it!" is actually a pretty common notion, and a deconstruction of cyberpunk would examine that.

[Mr. Mask]

Hmm, I don't know if a deconstruction has to be solely negative. If you deconstruct cyberpunk, it'd probably include stuff like presenting the bleak slum future, but subvert it by presenting things like kindly strangers, having genuinely helpful government officials, and when the doctor said that the main character's rejection of the cybernetics would improve over time it actually does, etc.. Essentially a heartwarming cyberpunk story.

You could instead focus on deconstructing the few pros of a cyber punk world (I disagree that a deconstruction would not be allowed to look at these, any more than Watchmen couldn't mess with the super heroes). Just about no one gets augmentations because cutting your arms off is crazy (a few do for plot reasons), and those who do are actually impaired more than they're helped due to poor quality parts and limitations of cybernetics. Then, everything gets a little less fun and a little more bleak. But as you mention, it doesn't carry a lot of narrative significance.

The question of corporations and deconstructing the bleak vileness of the world makes me wonder if a deconstruction has to be realistic. Justifying a subversion of the world assumptions just because they're subversive seems less neat.

[Knaight]

I think the thing being missed here is that cybernetics have a place for those who have lost or malformed limbs. Even in a world with exoskeletons, you will have people born with defects or who suffer amputations (accidental or medically necessary). Cybernetic replacement limbs will definitely be of interest to them. As will cybernetic replacement organs for people suffering from damaged or destroyed ones.
One of the cyperpunk genre conventions is dystopian societies with prominent underclasses that nobody cares about, corporations that embody that not caring, and similar things. Ubiquitous attitudes of utter apathy towards work injuries on the basis of "they can just replace the limb anyways" fits beautifully. Similarly, if limb loss is common because large chunks of the population are living in ghettos controlled by violent gangs, with the occasional incursion of violent police forces, violent private security forces, and just generally people who don't care about the people living there who are more than willing to cripple them, you'll still be seeing cybernetic limbs. Both of these also feel like the sort of thing you'd expect from cyberpunk.


It does require you use or at least subvert the core tropes associated with the genre. Having a cyberpunk setting where the prosthetics are only slightly better than modern day doesn't really really fit cyberpunk, unless the primary focus of the setting is on how it's subverting the tropes of the genre.
It can fit just fine. Yes, one comparatively minor trait wasn't included. If there's still technological advancement that is generally making people's lives worse, the aforementioned dystopian societies and deeply immoral corporations, significant computerization, and all those other trappings and thematic elements of cyberpunk, many of which are vastly more important than cybernetics, there's still a cyperpunk setting. It's just a more grounded one.

[dargman69]

Mm, exactly. Why get your arms hacked off to equip robotic limbs, when you can just buy an exosuit you can ride in, at a cheaper price.

[ImNotTrevor]

Whaf if cyberpunk games and settings are also about having fun and being cool.

And a dude who is a cyborg is generally cooler than a dude who puts on an exoskeleton unless it's Tony Stark in a flying, lazerbeem-shooting peice of distilled BAMF.

And one of the major themes of cyberpunk is the exchange of humanity for technological advancement. Literally distancing ourselves from what it means to be human by becoming more like the machines that fill our lives. It's a conflict of Man vs. Mechanization.

Does the Man retain his true self in light of the growing world of tech around him, or does he become more Machine and thus buy into the growing mechanism of the world power.

That's why corporations are usually evil in cyberpunk. They represent The Machine. The unfeeling, faceless thing that chews up humanity for the sake of efficiency, profit, and improval of The Machine itself at the cost of humanity. Those who work for the corps are portrayed like robots because they can be said to have bought in to The Machine and given up their Humanity and freedom.

An Exosuit breaks that dichotomy. You get to buy into The Machine and remain fully Human at the same time, which blatantly flies in the face of the CORE conflict. To tread the razor edge between The Machine and The Human must be a risky one. That is why Shadowrunners live dangerous lives in Shadowrun. They walk the precarious edge between working for the corps (one of the many faces of The Machine) and being free (And thus on the side of Man.) And that is a dangerous road.

The Machine presents itself in cyberpunk in many ways:
-As literal machines which invade human life and, specifically, create a dependency.
-The corporations (don't tell me youve never head of The Corporate Machine. It's a pretty common term.) Who consume humanity as a resource and also create dependency and subjugation to The Machine.
-Those who give up their humanity to join with The Machine. (People who plug their brains into computers, hackers who spend their life glued to a computer, etc.) Representing the act of throwing away one's humanity and freedom to become part of the machine. (Can also be seen as double agents who risk themselves to subvert the machine from within.)

Cybernetics make you LITERALLY part-machine. The Machine is now within that character and will always be there, like a parasite. In Shadowrun, this PERMANENTLY DAMAGES YOUR SOUL.

That's not heavy-handed symbolism for abandoning one's humanity to be more machine.

Why don't cyberpunk writers use exoskeletons? Because it eliminates or severely alleviates a huge part of the man/machine conflict, which is the MAIN CONFLICT.

It's like wondering why the cowboy in the western doesn't take his bounty money and just settle down and start a ranch since he'll be less likely to die and make more money. Well, because the core conflict of a western is Man VS Society. That's why. (Often played with both sides being the better one interchangeably.)
That's also why you don't see a lot of nomadic cultures made up of cowboys and cowgirls in a western settings, either.

It's not about practicality, but thematics. If it was about practicality, virtually NONE of cyberpunk would be what it is if it were meant to be practical. In fact, neither would steampunk. Or scifi. Or fantasy.

So arguing for practicality in this one area is silly unless you want to go 100% practical, in which case Cyberpunk isn't what you want in the first place.

[goto124]

We're trying to figure out how to make cybernetics and exoskeletons have different advantages and disadvantages such that we have better justifications for using dehumanizing cybernetics than "exoskeletons don't exist somehow, but cybernetics damage your soul!"

[Nifft]

Thank you for confirming you were insulting me earlier with your statements about ignorance and lacking research. Hypocrisy suits you. The fact that you're wrong about something is not an insult. Likewise with ignorance: it just means you don't know something. Most people don't know most things, and this fact is not an insult to them.

(It just means that their uninformed opinions are unlikely to be valuable, similar to how your uninformed opinion is not worth anything.)

Calling me names, though: that actually is an insult. Doing that can make someone a bad person, and also get you banned. Please stop, instead of calling me more names (e.g.: "hypocrite").

Again, the fact that you respond to reasoned arguments and citations which contradict your unsupported opinions with insults and dismissal is saying plenty of negative things about you, but not me.


What if you played up the aspect of the environment becoming toxic? Something that requires you to physically alter people to a dramatic extent in order for them to function in the environment. You could theoretically just go to atmopheric suits and rooms, but if you're going to spend your whole life in those conditions (and possibly have to work in them), then cybernetic alteration may seem more reasonable. Drones and riggers do this much better.

AIs do it better (depending on the specifics of the environment).

Large vehicles do it better than cybernetics or exosuits.


To Mr. Mask; Post-Cyberpunk: After cyberpunk, a setting where society has progressed out of cyberpunk (or the corporate dystopia part). Some posts ago I described cyberpunk as a society experiencing growing pains and where technology didn't really help? Well by that metric post-cyberpunk has grown ant its technology is actually helpful. (I wouldn't count Snow Crash as this by the way.) Can you cite that definition, or is that just off the top of your head?

By the literary criticism definition (which I found reprinted in an easy to discover location (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberpunk_derivatives#Postcyberpunk)), it's got nothing to do with the setting "progressing out of cyberpunk" -- just as Post-Impressionism is not about a painting "progressing out of Impressionism", but rather about the theme, timing, and techniques of the author.

By the presumably official definition, Snow Crash does count. (As an aside, the Wikipedia page for Snow Crash lists it as both Postcyberpunk and Cyberpunk, which is kinda interesting.)


To Nifft; there is a significant difference between tweaking with some features of a gene and "ignoring half of it". Elements of genes can roughly be divided into two groups: first fundamentals which are what make a gene what it is. Each gene has about 2-3 fundamentals Nope. Sorry.

You're not getting away with defining what you like as "fundamentals" and what you don't like as frivolous.

Genres have many elements which vary in importance from work to work; they also have stylistic conceits, which also vary from work to work, but which often share some compatible themes. Genres have central and peripheral members, just like most other human categories of thought.

Finally, genre conceits can be a lens to view the works which precede the genre. For example, it would not be accurate to describe Asimov's Foundation series as Cyberpunk, but one could certainly look at the series as being about some technologically informed rebels working against a much larger dystopian society which is falling apart.


There are no formal cut offs for when something stops being a member of a gene. You said it yourself "your trying to trying to draw lines where none are possible". However in my experience when we can agree that something is not part of a gene it is because one of the fundamentals changed. Sometimes changing enough of the conventions will also have that effect, for instance the difference between "a modern setting with magic" and "urban fantasy" is the inclusion of a lot of fantasy's conventions. But then that sort of becomes a fundamental for urban fantasy.

Four:
Defining a gene by the most prominent works is not invalid, but it is not a useful definition in many cases. For instance lets say back when Lord of the Rings came out people said "yes, this is now fantasy" and then when The Chronicles of Narina came out people would look and it and say "no, that is not fantasy". Initial reception to the Narnia books was poor because it was initially perceived as Fantasy, according to the two sources I can find. Today it's certainly perceived as Fantasy. Here is a handy summary, with citations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lion,_the_Witch_and_the_Wardrobe#Reception

Can you cite anyone other than yourself who thinks that Narnia was ever thought to be non-Fantasy?

- - -

Genre inclusion can be tricky, sure, but a lot of people have thought about it for a while, and generally if you wait 30-50 years, you can get a decent span of opinions which tend to point in a valid direction.

What I said about drawing lines, though -- that's not a universal truth. Sometimes lines really can be drawn.

With respect to genres in particular, the lines are not around fundamental properties, but rather between groups of works. That is to say, they're not based on inherent fundamentals of the works themselves, but rather the relationship between the works and other works. Genres are lines we draw between groups of works to discuss those groups more easily -- and future works can impose different groupings on past works without changing anything fundamental about the past works.

In fact, that's almost always exactly what happens -- like with Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, it wasn't described as cyberpunk until over a decade after its publication, in no small part because the term didn't yet exist. It was only after many other works with similar themes were published that people decided: "hey, this grouping of works needs a name".

[Cluedrew]

Well Nifft besides a few misspeaks on my part (like clarifying that the Narnia thing was a hypothetical situation, I agree Narnia is fantasy) and some wording differences... we actually seem to be in agreement. Except for the bit where I'm wrong and wrong to use a non-standard definition for post-cyberpunk (or any other genre). The definitions I use work for me and the conversations I get into commonly.

To goto124; Is that what this is about? I had forgotten. Really I still say make the dehumanizing cybernetics a symbol of the dehumanization already going on.

[Mr. Mask]

The question is why the changes are going on. If you're dehumanizing just for the sake of dehumanizing, it's not really so dramatic. You could try to play up that very aspect, that no one understands why people are trying to become less human, perhaps build up the aspect that people want to get away from all the negative associations of humanity.

[Knaight]

The question is why the changes are going on. If you're dehumanizing just for the sake of dehumanizing, it's not really so dramatic. You could try to play up that very aspect, that no one understands why people are trying to become less human, perhaps build up the aspect that people want to get away from all the negative associations of humanity.

The point of the dumanization is not that individuals want themselves to be less human. The point is that the large scale systems in which people exist - cultures, individual organizations, but especially corporations - don't care about people. The cyberpunk limbs fit into this, as the not caring about people can lead to lots of things like industrial accidents, medical disasters (think Thalidomide), severe malnutrition, institutionalized violence in slums and ghettos, so on and so forth. Then you have other things that emphasize this. In the face of a system that seems impossible to change, run by faceless bureaucracies under the rule of astoundingly rich oligarchs, resistance seems futile. Escape on the other hand...well there's all sorts of exciting new drugs.

If you really have to have people willingly adopting parts of the system (the cyberware) to fight the system, one option would be plain ubiquity. Severe injuries that require prosthetic limbs to fix are really common, and while most aren't great, there are black market combat prosthetics that don't stand out. They're subtle in a way that exoskeletons really aren't, and attention is a bad thing to draw.

[Mr. Mask]

Fair enough, having cyber limbs present is easy enough. The main trouble is making cyborgs competitive with exosuits, or just more useful than a biological body in general. For that, you need to justify replacement of most of the muscle and skeleton in the body.

[ImNotTrevor]

Why is Surgery the only possible solution to that problem? We're using future tech and pretty advanced biotechnology. (I mean, we are hooking prosthetics up to nerves with full effect. That's REALLY advanced. And it's common enough for an industrial accident victim to get one? Ten times more advanced that what was just established, because now they can be made relatively cheaply.

For regular cybernetics, they're no stronger than regular human stuff. No problem. Just plug and play, as it were.

Black Market stuff is crazy.

Reinforced bone structure? Sure. They do something like a Bone Marrow transplant laced with some seriously dicey FUTURE SCIENCE that makes the bones begin to produce natural carbon fibers to support themselves.(or just makes them thicker or otherwise screws with your DNA and bones) You take a pill everyday that keep the meds active and supplies the extra carbon you need.
Lots of people die doing this.
That's why it's Black Market mods.

A dark room. The doctor says "Your bones will feel like they are on fire for the next week. Take these inhalers of Dreamcloud. They'll keep you sufficiently doped out to feel nothing."
That totally works with Cyberpunk.

And look at that, it also gives a reason why someone would choose cybernetics over exosuit. Free reinforced skeleton with purchase, and none of the inconveniences of using an exoskeleton. The advantage of reinforced bones always is... you can't be caught without it on.

If you run around in an exosuit, the people who hate you will wait until you take it off, then kill you. You don't need to take off a cybernetic.

And besides, one robot arm is cheaper than an entire robot body you can put a person in, even with the meatball surgery and dicey meds to make it work.

Blackmarket, military grade exosuits would be insanely expensive. Built in weapons systems, targeting, sensors, fuel requirements.... probably more expensive than an unusually strong arm and a weird liquid injected in your spine.

And once you're started on cybernetics, well... it's easier to justify those rather than going exosuit.

Once enough people choose that over exosuits, exosuits disappear because nobody buys them. Remember: Betamax tapes were arguably better than VHS in many ways.... but VHS won by being more popular and getting more support from corporations, in large part due to being cheap.

If occasional cybernetics to those who get injured are cheaper than a fleet of Exosuits, their fuel, and their maintenance...guess which one the corps will pick? Number 1.

I can go on and on. Pick a reason. It's fiction. It's not reality. You can bend the rules. I figure you either have exosuits and cybernetics are REALLY rare, or you do something like outlined above, or you really stretch for it and do something weird that borders on the pre-apocalyptic rather than Cyberpunkish. (Everyone is having limbs rot and fall off for NO REASON and ALL THE AIR IS POISON sounds like something out of The Book of Revelations.)

Having people randomly need them is EXACTLY as BS as having them randomly be cheaper than exosuits or randomly be preferred. It's just BSing you're comfortable with.

[Satinavian]

Fair enough, having cyber limbs present is easy enough. The main trouble is making cyborgs competitive with exosuits, or just more useful than a biological body in general. For that, you need to justify replacement of most of the muscle and skeleton in the body.

-Exosuits are slower
-Exosuits can not nearly be as nimble or strong as remote controlled robots would be because they still need to fit around a human body and exactly where you would normally place the joints and the important structures, you have to leave place for the human limbs
-Exosuits can severely injure you whenever you have a cramp
-Exosuits are bulky while most architecture and devices are made for normal sized humans.
-Exosuits would never fit around normal hands and you would have to use real robot hands anyway
-Industrial Exosuits are far more expensive than industrial robots

Instead of asking "why not exosuits instead?", it would be better to ask "what could Exosuits do in a world where Cyberimplants and robots exist ?" The only answer coming to mind would be the use in environment inherently unhealthy, where you have to seal the human body anyway. But even then you have to ask "why not just robots ?"


Concerning Post-Cyberpunk :

It is basically Cyberpunk withoput the dystopia (and possibly without the punk). It doesn't deal so much with rebelling against the system and more with how people adapt to the technological and societal changes. It's not utopian either. Technology does mostly what it is supposed to do, but that does not automatically solve all problems. It solves some problems.

And because rejection of the system is no longer an important part, Cyberware tends to loose some of the the "evil", "road to nowhere" and "loss of self/humanity" connotations and transhumanism embracing the changes creeps in. While still many people reject implants others (not only insane villains) embrace them. And are happy afterwards.

I prefer Post-Cyberpunk to Cyberpunk. Dystopias have never made it easy to create versimilitude as humans tend to adept and make they can out of their life instead of living in eternal despair and hopelessness. That is even more true in RPGs where players are asked to portray people living in such a world and are somewhat free to choose goals and actions.
Also i never really got Punk.

[Milo v3]

-Exosuits are bulky while most architecture and devices are made for normal sized humans.
Doesn't look too bulky for me:
http://s3.media.squarespace.com/production/465215/5366925/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/robot_suit_03.jpg

[Satinavian]

That one covers only very few muscle groups and thus only enhances some movements (especcially lifting things in front of you) while being a hindrance for most others.

[Mr. Mask]

Satin: Does an exosuit's muscles need to be in anatomically identical locations to a human's? I'm not sure. I though you had some more freedom with that, if you were using servos.

Arguments about why not use a robot are really just as applicable to cyborgs.


Trevor: I think they have some external sets already that can read your brain or nerve signals and tell the arm to move based off them. I don't know how accurate they are, so hooking the arm directly to the nerves might be useful.

I think I suggested near the start of the thread you could try to have genetic engineering or nanomachines which allow you to modify the muscle and bone of the cyborg, so that the operation might just be a few simple injections.

If they need to remove an arm, normally that'd be about as expensive as a robot suit. That is, if you want your nerves hooked up to the robot arm. And since without a modified skeleton the robot arm won't be much better than your actual arm, why not just wear an exogauntlet? You could try to figure chop-shops having specialized machines that make cutting off an arm and attaching a cybernetic one as easy as working a paper cutter. Not sure if that's plausible.

If your robot arm is as strong as the military exosuit, it will likely work off the same battery system, making fuelling it and acquiring the parts just as expensive. If there is war in the criminal underworld, getting an affordable second-hand exosuit without the bells and whistles is likely possible. Hard to say how expensive illegal, highly dangerous self-enhancing drugs/nanonmachines/retroviruses/injections would be.

I don't see any way power armour/exoskeletons would die out or lose in popularity, it would be the other way around. The military can't use the illegal enhancements, so it creates factories which mass produce five million exosuits, which later get outdated and become military surplus sold to criminals when society breaks down. Similarly, if corps are going to any expense (AKA: weaponizable cybernetics), they'll prefer the option that actually allows their workers to work like a crane, doesn't require fancy medical procedures, and can be piloted by any worker who is working the shift, rather than a fancy arm that can't lift more than usual and might give their workers rejection issues.

Good fiction doesn't come up with hyperbole to justify its premise, it comes up with a plausible, interesting well thought out reason. You can justify the premise of a story with it just being the premise, but it's preferable if your world makes sense.


I'd still say brittle bone disease becoming epidemic so corporations are performing potentially useful, but highly dangerous bone replacement operations would work as a premise. The bones might be military grade, just because they don't want to have to replace them (though they will rip them out of your body when you die, then scrub and reuse them) too often, and people are probably so cheap that having several die (particularly brittle boned ones considered useless) in order to get a few walking forklifts seems a worthwhile investment (though how they get medical personnel to work over dozens of people at an affordable rate, or the details of their bone-replacing injected solutions are up for debate).

[Satinavian]

Satin: Does an exosuit's muscles need to be in anatomically identical locations to a human's? I'm not sure. I though you had some more freedom with that, if you were using servos.Difficult. You might have the motors somewhere else but you absolutely can't move the joints around and you will also need something replacing the function of sinews pretty much at the same places where biological sinews are and you need your servos attached to that. Overall, exosuits are really difficult and not nearly as usefull as often assumed in fiction. There is no way to get nearly the same kind of mobility as a human has. At the same time they might be stronger but not faster while performing the limited set of motions they allow. Cyberlimbs won't ever reach the same kind of strength without also replacing most of the torso muscles, sinews and bones. They will probably only be insignificantly stronger than the original. But they will allow the same kind of mobility of a normal human, maybe even more. So they also would be less usefull than in fiction but in a different way than exosuits. Which is the reason both could easily coexist because they are useful for very different things.

Arguments about why not use a robot are really just as applicable to cyborgs.You don't intruduce cyborgs to make regular workers stronger. If you need more strength, use a robot. If you really need the flexibility of a human and more strength, you can make an antropomorphic remote controlled robot and still have an easier time than with cyberlimbs or exosuits.

Cybernetic development should be concerned mostly with replacement for lost limbs and organs(as there is always demand) and completely new abilities for humans. Actually with cyberlimbs you would have more freedom with general form, locations of joints and so on and could allow a human to go beyond humanlike limbs allowing completely new movements.


I think I suggested near the start of the thread you could try to have genetic engineering or nanomachines which allow you to modify the muscle and bone of the cyborg, so that the operation might just be a few simple injections.That would be a completely new level of technology, far beyond what discussed so far. It would change the world far more than some imlants.

[Segev]

Theoretically, you could extend the same concept that goes into human hands to entire limbs with the right design. There are actually little to no muscles in the hands (especially the fingers); the muscles we use for things like typing, playing the piano or guitar, and using tools are all in our forearms, connected to long tendons that reach up along the fingers. Our fingers are, in a sense, marionettes for our forearms.

It would require a lot of architectural design to get the same range of movement, but a "backpack" of servos tied to a complex set of puppet-strings feeding through the limbs could do something similar. Then you'd just need the "tendons" and the "bones" of the system to be strong enough for whatever you were having it do to augment you.

[ImNotTrevor]

Satin: -SNIP-

Brain-reading robot arms:
As far as I'm aware, brain-conttolled limbs were done once. On a monkey. And they plugged things into its brain directly through the skull. And the arm wasn't attached. And all it did was copy the large muscle movement within a very limited range. Even if the one human prosthetic I'm thinking of actually read input from the brain, it is still nowhere near as smooth or detailed in movement as a real hand. If I remember correctly, they usually use the movement of the stump inside the cup to define their motion. And usually that motion is simple stuff like Open/Close and Swing In/Swing Out.

We are a LONG way from human trials on that front, let alone what Cyberpunk has in terms of finesse.

You can't automatically say that surgery is more expensive than an exosuit. Here is why:
Surgery might be way cheaper. Don't use US prices to measure reasonable surgery costs. I can fly to Spain, pay for my own surgery out of pocket, and fly back to the US for the same cost that I would be charged after insurance for surgery here. Depends on the surgery, obviously, but there are surprisingly many where that is the case. And remember: the Euro is stronger than the Dollar. And this takes that into account.

And exosuit, in comparison, costs around 70,000 dollars. (Currently) so they will likely always cost about as much as a car. As they get more accurate to brain commands, they will either get more expensive or stay the same. Don't expect to pick up an industrial exosuit for less than 20k us dollars, ever.

And these prosthetics? Cyberpunk already tells us that they are relatively common, if black market versions aren't. Common enough that people don't stare anymore. Common means cheap. Also, prosthetics are already pretty cheap, even the robotic ones we do have. (About 10-30k, if memory serves right) Cheaper than an exosuit.

And do you know what's even cheaper than an exosuit for lifting? A Forklift.
You know what's cheaper than an exosuit for diving? A scuba suit.
You know what's cheaper than an exosuit for nearly any non-military application? What we already have. The exosuits being developed are unlikely to catch on in the industrial sector. How often do we really need a guy to solo-lift 900+ pounds? And why wouldn't we get a forklift to do it? Or just use straps and a bunch of guys or any myriad of cheaper solutions?

A world in which prosthetics are justifiable as commonplacr is VASTLY easier than one where exosuits are justifiable as commonplace.

Did I mention that industrial exosuits can't run?

Why wouldn't Corps buy exosuits? They solve a problem that isn't real. How exactly is a man gonna work like a crane?
*He can pick up heavy stuff!" That's maybe 20% of a crane's purpose. Can he also transport it twenty stories straight up at faster than walking pace through a maze of scaffolding and unfinished floors faster than a crane can life it straight up? No? Then the suit is frivolous.

Can he pick up a thing and haul it faster than a forklift can? No? Then it's frivolous and wasteful.

Can he go into places where no other form of protection can go? And do it cheaper than a drone can? Toss in the cost of insurance and NOPE.

Justifying the Exosuit is the difficulty here, not justifting prosthetics. We NEED prosthetics. People will always lose limbs. Industrial exosuits? Hahahahaha. No.

"But a forklift is so big!" Make a smaller forklift. About the diameter of a trashcan with forks that expand. Maybe even fold in. Easier to run than an exosuit. Easier to just grab and go. Moves at the same pace as an exosuit and would easily be half the cost.

Any problem you say can be solved with an exosuit can be solved cheaper and easier and probably already has. And if you can only come up with weird sideways circumstances that only an exosuit can solve, then they REALLY don't merit the expense.

Remember: until it is cheaper to outfit a soldier with an exosuit than it is to fix them up in an army hospital, we won't put them in exosuits. End of story.

Brittlw Bone disease becoming suddenly an epidemic for no good reason is just as BS and hand-wavey as "Exosuits are popular for some reason" and "Cyberware if popular for some reason." It's just BS you are comfortable with.

If Brittle Bone disease became an epidemic... why? Why did it become one? Why was nothing else done about this other than making cyberware that actually EXACERBATES the problem as opposed to, I dunno.... making a medicine to treat it? Why fix a problem all at once when you can treat it over their lifetime and charge them every step of the way?

Exosuits are harder to justify here, not cybernetics.

[Mr. Mask]

Segev: That'd be pretty neat. It's probably limited in application due to the kinds of material for wires and levers we have available. Still could be used to an interesting effect.


Satin: Well, retroviruses and nanomachines are already in the works. We have goats that produce spider silk. It certainly has a lot of biotech related possibilities, along with biological warfare, medicine, and all sorts. As do the nanomachines. I still bring it up as one of the few ways you can justify cyborgs.


Trevor: Not sure what you mean about a long way from human trials. Looking into it, it seems a small probe being inserted in the head is the current direction of this research: http://www.bbc.com/news/health-32784534
Whether we see external sensors come to use is hard to say, though even Microsoft made a toy that could do that. It may sadly lack the necessary finesse. Of course, a exosuit used for lifting boxes into a truck likely does not require a lot of finesse. For that matter, what system do modern exosuits use for control? Do they really need to be jacked in, when the current prototypes don't require any jacking?

Do you assume all kinds of surgery have the same price, have the same specialists and levels of training, and are equally difficult regardless of procedure? Using large relative wealth to a poorer country, surgery becomes a lot more affordable. Just like the Playstation is much cheaper in India and China (and so possibly would be a cheap Chinese exosuit). I'm not sure if an operation to remove the skeleton is even possible while keeping the patient alive, and if it is you're likely talking dozens of 10 hour surgeries with high level medical professionals where the patient needs to spend weeks between operations in a state of paralysis. The only way an exosuit could be more expensive than that was if it was custom designed instead of factory produced and made of rare metals. The fact you refuse to bleieve such makes me wonder if you're a bit too concerned with justifying cyborgs.

You seem to have no concept of economy of scale. If the US military decides to mass manufacture a million suits, they'll be far, far less expensive than a custom-built prototype made in a lab. I had thought it was blatantly obvious that two robotic hands and two robotic legs would be more expensive than one robotic hand of the same quality, barring unusual economic details (like not mass producing cybernetics). If you want to become a full cyborg of the same strength as that 70K exosuit, custom made, you're talking about 70K worth of parts, PLUS the expenses of operating (which today may cost you hundreds of thousands to get your bones replaced and servos put in). Compare the number of forklifts mass manufactured per year to the number of exosuits.

Of course, there's nothing to say exosuits will replace forklifts. Forklifts are pretty convenient for most tasks. The military is looking into exosuits to replace forklifts for convenience, and other sectors might as well, but it's possible that won't live up to expectations, or it will never gain mass popularity. You might build a large exosuit like in Alien which may have reach more similar to cranes, but at that scale does the humanoid shape actually get you anything? It's unlikely they'd replace major forklifts, and particularly not cranes, even if they had use with loading boxes onto trucks or such. Do you know what it means if militaries and companies do not consider exosuits worthwhile? No one would consider cybernetics worth while for those tasks. The idea of having your workers hacked apart and made cyborgs will get you laughed out of the room, with jokes made of it for years afterwards.

Cybernetics are more likely to be commonplace in the same scale as today. As I said already, a world where the amputees have robot limbs is easy. Those robot limbs won't be as useful than a human limb, or might be slightly more useful at best. You aren't going to get cyborgs who can compete with power armour by any stretch of the imaginations from a few amputees. You might get one or two robocops, made more for publicity than usefulness, and they might be comparable to a military exosuit.

If the military exosuit can't run (certainly industrial ones won't need to), then the cybernetics available won't be able to either. Current servos have difficulty climbing stairs, so it might be exosuits and cybernetics are still inferior to human limbs in several aspects.


"But a forklift is so big!" Make a smaller forklift. About the diameter of a trashcan with forks that expand. Maybe even fold in. Easier to run than an exosuit. Easier to just grab and go. Moves at the same pace as an exosuit and would easily be half the cost. "

It's called an automatic jack. They might make some with forks.


"Remember: until it is cheaper to outfit a soldier with an exosuit than it is to fix them up in an army hospital, we won't put them in exosuits. End of story."

What kind of logic is this? But yeah, exosuits are likely to become cheaper than medical support for wounded when you mass manufacture them. The idea of waiting around till your soldiers get maimed so you can pretend to improve them is nuts. They won't be able to carry more, deal with recoil better, punch harder, or have any of the other advantages of power armour, but they will have a sweet-looking set of robot limbs, which are probably slightly more useful in specific cases. Meanwhile, the army that incorporates exosuits will be carrying around heavier, more effective weapons, will be more resistant to your fire, will tire less when marching and fighting, and will have lesser expenses for their medical team due to their better armour and fewer casualties (men with a broken exosuit can also still fight as effectively as a cyborg, unlike a cyborg who lost some mechanical limbs).


"If Brittle Bone disease became an epidemic... why? Why did it become one? Why was nothing else done about this other than making cyberware that actually EXACERBATES the problem as opposed to, I dunno.... making a medicine to treat it? Why fix a problem all at once when you can treat it over their lifetime and charge them every step of the way?"

Umm... what? You could argue all sorts of reason for why brittle bone disease may become more common. There isn't a particular reason we should expect it to become endemic. The reason it might become endemic is mutations from a failed retrovirus experiment, or just it becomes more prevalent the same way new forms of cancer seem to crop up occasionally. There are several realistic ways it could happen, even if such is not guaranteed. How on earth does cyberware exacerbate the problem? Do you think that brittle bone disease is infectious? That may be my fault if so, as I meant to write endemic but it came out epidemic. As for the last question... I wonder if you know anything about medicine at all. Why don't they make a medicine to cure brittle bone disease NOW? I'm not familiar with what treatment methods are popular and how effective they are, but I know it is not curable. If it became more common, there wouldn't be a lot we could do. If you were assuming it was infectious, you can still put the question of why we don't cure ebola or aids or anthrax (there is a vaccine for the latter, but the vaccine is very dangerous, so only US military get that shot in America).


"Exosuits are harder to justify here, not cybernetics."

You keep on believing that if you want to. As I will make no further effort to reason otherwise.

[ImNotTrevor]

Schnip.

Judging by that last bit, you seem to be going with the "Dismiss the Idiot" strategy. That or you're actually upset by an internet discussion about whether or not Cyberpunk is realistic enough. Luckily the response to both is the same:
Dude. Really?

As for the rest of the points:

THE DUDE WITH THE ROBOT ARM.
After taking the time to actually read the article, I continue to laugh. This arm takes input from 100 neurons in the motor cortex. 100. In the cellular level, 100 cells is nothing. A speck.
And this arm appears to be able to do exactly what I said I was pretty sure they do:
Swing in/Swing out
Open/Close.
Maybe move up and down.
6 kinds of motion, and not particularly fine control. (It's not like he reached out and picked the glass off the table, turned on the sink, threw in the ice, unwrapped and inserted a straw on his own. Run through those motions in your head and see how much fine control is needed for each.)

Now look at your arm. Look at all of the possible ways that it moves. Think of how many more neurons would need to be processed for all of that movements. Think of the processing power needed for several million neurons to fire. (Out of 100 billion, that's not much for an Arm.) And to process all of that data and turn it into movement. And to do so at the same rate the human brain does. And to fit that into a space the size of an arm. Now take that tech and make it available to anyone, not just one guy who volunteered to be experimented on.

Not exactly something we can expect to happen in the next 5 years. Next 50 or 60, sure. Maybe.

SURGICAL COSTS
first, playstations are not cheaper in India and China. Nifty idea, though.
Second, didn't we just talk about how when we're dealing with future tech we can invent revolutions in science and surgery being the only solution is really uncreative? I think we did.
I was referring to the surgery needed to stick the arm on. Nothing more than that.

ECONOMY OF SCALE
You throw that term out like it fixes everything.
Mass Production means it will be super cheap!
Where's my 5 dollar car, then?
Same place your 300 dollar exosuit is. Imagination land.

Exosuits will cost about as much as a car. Or about as much as a really nice forklift. (Forklifts are, understandably, much cheaper than cars.)

And the main point of this argument is this:
CORPORATIONS CARE ABOUT PROFITS FIRST. IF THEY CAN DO IT CHEAPER ONE WAY WITH NO LOSS OF EFFECTIVENESS, THEY WILL DO IT THAT WAY.

If a Forklift does more than an exosuit, for cheaper, then the exosuit will not be mass adopted. Each factory will have maybe 5 for those rare cases where they're needed.

Also, the idea that someone can just hope into a frame that makes them insanely strong and just know how to operate it safely is just...goofy. Some sort of authority would INSIST on licensed operation of exosuits.

You also already offered a cheapn easy alternative to when forklifts are too big. So why not use one of those? Answer: There is none. Use one of what we already have.

The current exoskeletons being used by the military aren't for combat. They're for hiking. Letting people carry even bigger backpacks. There's no armor on them.


You also seem to be putting words in my mouth. I said specifically:
Cybernetics would be about as commonplace as prosthetics are now, in a strictly realistic future setting that is growing further and further from Cyberpunk and is approaching Near Future.

However, if some guy wants to go buy some black market cybernetics, sure. You think everything in a black market is old military surplus? Hahahahaha.

Go down to Ciudad Del Este in Paraguay, one of the largest black markets in the world. I've been there. Most of what you see is made by the sellers or made by people who specifically make black market items.
You really think no one would make a really buff cyber arm and sell it on the black market? Of course they would. Does that mean it's safe? Nope. Already covered that.

SOLDIERS IN EXOSUITS
The logic of that statement is this:
If it is cheaper to fix a soldier up after they get injured than it is to make every single soldier wear an exosuit, then we will not produce exosuits for soldiers.

What this means is: Exosuits are currently too expensive. And they don't have armor on them. (The 70k ones? No armor. And it's just a pair of legs they use for paraplegics.)

Just like how if it's cheaper for a company to use cheap cardboard boxes and bubblewrap than it is for them to use reinforced carboard boxes, they will do the former.

If you can give me 3 situations in which an exosuit is 100% more effective than and cheaper than ANY OTHER reasonable alternative, I'll concede the point. But I don't see it.

BRITTLE BONE DISEASE
"There are lots of reasons brittle bone disease could become endemic"
Yet you listed... none. That sure is lots.

"How does cyberware exacerbate the problem?"
By your logic: You have to reinforce the whole skeleton or the cyberware will make your body explode or whatever. Sticking cyberware in a person is...not a solution.

"Infectious? Cures?"
It's a kind of osteoporosis. I googled it.
You take bone-strengthening meds and other osteoporosis treatments. (Sound familiar to the stronger bone pill I mentioned earlier?)
It can't be cured. But treatment makes you pretty much normal.
Also, it's a genetic disease. Unless those brittle boned people go about doing a very specific bone-related activity, it will not become endemic. (If we're sticking with an attempt at 100% realism)


In the end:
Cybernetic Prosthetics: Very Likely. Peeps need arms. Weaponized? Eh. Probably not.
Industrial Exosuits: Lol. Not any time soon. Mostly pointless.
Military Exosuits: Maybe? But by the time we get exosuits like that you may as well use a remote controlled robot and then NOBODY dies or is injured. Nifty.


In Cyberpunk:
Do things make the most pragmatic sense? No. They dont. Just like in Steampunk and Fantasy. It's for thematic and dramatic use. Not for being as real as possible. People are remarkable willing to accept cybernetics that are really strong just because they are. And that's OK. We also accept ageless elves that stay 30 for eternity and Hyperdrives. It's ok for us to also have unrealistic cyber arms while we play our cyberpunk dice games about being cyborg badasses. Really.
Throw in exosuits, too. Or instead of. No one will care so long as both are cool.

If you want to know why Cyberpunk has lots of cybernetic implants, it's this:
The thought that I can have a super strong gatling gun robot arm IS AWESOME. That's why.

[Mr. Mask]

Come to think of it, there was a guy with bones said to be eleven times as dense. The question being how much more force he could exert before it damaged his skeleton (not sure how bone scales up in this regard, particularly joints).

[Cluedrew]

One thing about cybernetics vs. exoskeletons. On a low level of inclusion, being part of the setting but not a major part, cybernetics are actually easier to justify as they are just an evolution of prosthetics. Prosthetics are already part of our world so it makes sense they would continue to be. Even if cybernetics are not a significant improvement of currant prosthetics they will still see some use. Then the simplest way to make them a larger part of the setting is to increase the number of lost limbs, which by accident and violence is not that hard in a dystopia.

Now exoskeletons... well super-human strength is actually overrated. It would be nice certainly but day-to-day life is tuned for normal levels of strength, construction has already developed a wide area of specialised tools which can out-preform the human form in many cases and combat... well if an army could afford to equip nearly every solider with power-armour than that could replace regular infantry, but otherwise it would probably fill a space between the regular infantry and vehicles. But even that requires some solutions and new technologies, especially in terms of powering the thing for a full combat.

So they both work, although exoskeletons require just a bit more work but not much, and fill very different rolls.

[Mr. Mask]

Yeah, having a bunch of amputees is easy. Trying to play the cyborg trope of making them seem physically more dangerous is hard. Getting them to play a similar role to power armour.

We would need the improvement in battery tech researchers are always promising to have effective power armour, but I figure one day that will become the case. Exoskeletons wouldn't have a lot of use in day to day life, maybe some use for construction workers or the like, and maybe some use in sport.

[Coidzor]

I don't see any issues on the surface. Cyberpunk characters generally avoid open military conflict where power armor and the like would be fully mobilized and usually gloss over the daily grind of grunt labor jobs or even specialized skilled labor applications.

They also would have only limited interactions with legitimate uses of exoskeletons like miniature versions of the power loader from the Alien franchise. Exoskeletons would generally be more visible and attention-generating compared with more stealthy and unobtrusive alternatives.

IIRC, Eclipse Phase has some strong cyberpunk elements despite having power armor and the like as extant technologies.

[Almarck]

I don't see any issues on the surface. Cyberpunk characters generally avoid open military conflict where power armor and the like would be fully mobilized and usually gloss over the daily grind of grunt labor jobs or even specialized skilled labor applications.

They also would have only limited interactions with legitimate uses of exoskeletons like miniature versions of the power loader from the Alien franchise. Exoskeletons would generally be more visible and attention-generating compared with more stealthy and unobtrusive alternatives.

IIRC, Eclipse Phase has some strong cyberpunk elements despite having power armor and the like as extant technologies.

Isn't Eclipse Phase a very highly Transhumanist setting?

[Mr. Mask]

In the war-torn, gang-war ridden, corporate ruled dystopia of cyberpunk, I imagine you'd see power armour everywhere, if you're messing with any major corporation or gang. Sticking to small time stuff and avoiding police armed responses would allow you to avoid power armour. Whether a runner could, and whether you'd even need cybernetic enhancement if that's your plan, is debatable.

[Coidzor]

Isn't Eclipse Phase a very highly Transhumanist setting?

So? It incorporates elements of cyberpunk in several of the presented avenues of play and certainly has its share of dystopian elements.

Where it departs from cyberpunk, it departs for reasons *other* than the existence of power armor and suits for augmenting meatbag bodies in zero-G environments and the occasional spacewalk and the existence of these things doesn't impede the cyberpunk elements and possible playstyles.

[Nifft]

I don't see any issues on the surface. Cyberpunk characters generally avoid open military conflict where power armor and the like would be fully mobilized and usually gloss over the daily grind of grunt labor jobs or even specialized skilled labor applications. Sure.

However, I bet a cool story could be made whereby some bit of military hardware were hijacked by a Cyberpunk protagonist to (briefly) wreck mayhem towards some anarchist and/or mercenary purpose.


They also would have only limited interactions with legitimate uses of exoskeletons like miniature versions of the power loader from the Alien franchise. Exoskeletons would generally be more visible and attention-generating compared with more stealthy and unobtrusive alternatives. Yep. IMHO mecha-skels would be more for industrial use, riot control (intimidation factor rather than killing power), and mobile military support (military repair and engineering corps rather than mecha-marines).

Cybernetics would be for prostheses, espionage (hidden cameras, etc.), and covert ops. The latter might very well be "better" than a natural limb, but those might tend to be expensive and/or illegal. (Not all Cyberpunk settings care much about laws, of course...)


IIRC, Eclipse Phase has some strong cyberpunk elements despite having power armor and the like as extant technologies.
Eclipse Phase can be played as a Cyberpunk game, but it can be played in other ways as well. It's a very flexible package.

[goto124]

illegal. (Not all Cyberpunk settings care much about laws, of course...)

It does mean you'll have to go through hoops to obtain them.

[ImNotTrevor]

Yep. IMHO mecha-skels would be more for industrial use, riot control (intimidation factor rather than killing power), and mobile military support (military repair and engineering corps rather than mecha-marines).


The only place I disagree with you is industrial. We have no need for an industrial exoskeleton except as an experiment in "Can We Do It?" But their practical applications are not many.

Having a guy who can suddenly benchpress a car is super nifty. And way less helpful in a construction situation than you would think.

He could, like, move some girders from one spot on the ground to another a little faster than a crane can. (Unless it's more than like... 10 girders) Or...be really really good and moving a bunch of bricks without getting tired?

These aren't problems that come up very much, though.

Need to haul a crate? Forklift. Way faster. Probably cheaper.

Need to take girder from ground to top of a building? Crane is WAAAAAY faster.

Industrial exosuits won't see much use.

As for military...ehhhhh.
The primariy infantry application I see for exosuits goes in two ways:
1. They stay really expensive, and are used very rarely and strictly for high mobility insanity. (Once an exosuit lets a SEAL run 60+mph and scale a ten story building in 15 seconds, they'll see a massive increase in use)
2. They get really cheap, and let us make 40k style Space Marines that move like normal people but have 3 inch iron plates and require a tank or rpg to take out one of them. Fear factor for one of those guys would be VERY HIGH, and he's not a substantially bigger target. And if he's not slow as hell...well, rockets become slightly less viable since he could theoretically tuck and roll. But this is an unlikely scenario.

Exosuits don't have a lot of practical use just yet. They need a reduction in price first.

[Knaight]

The only place I disagree with you is industrial. We have no need for an industrial exoskeleton except as an experiment in "Can We Do It?" But their practical applications are not many.

One of the areas that has been investigated in real life is hospitals, when it comes to things like moving emergency patients around in a hurry (where stretchers are generally used), or assisted movement for patients with mobility problems, or whatever else. A forklift or similar really doesn't work there the way it does in a warehouse.

[ImNotTrevor]

One of the areas that has been investigated in real life is hospitals, when it comes to things like moving emergency patients around in a hurry (where stretchers are generally used), or assisted movement for patients with mobility problems, or whatever else. A forklift or similar really doesn't work there the way it does in a warehouse.

Sure. But that's also not an industrial usage, is it?

That's a medical usage. And even then, I don't see how helpful that is since a humanoid form carrying a human implies a certain body position that many injured people cannot assume. (Think of all the ways you can carry a person. Now make that person injured/post-op/pregnant/bleeding everywhere and see how many of those positions become really bad ideas.)

Stretchers still make more sense, most of the time. Being able to have one person move the stretcher would be great. So motorize the stretcher. Solved for less money.

The only medical use I have personally seen for exosuits is to help paraplegics walk and move again. That's it.

Exosuits aren't likely to catch on, even though the concept is AWESOME. It's just not quite practical enough for wide-range use.

[Nifft]

Exosuits don't have a lot of practical use just yet. They need a reduction in price first.

Just in case it wasn't clear previously, all my comments about the viability of exosuits are in the context of a game set in the future.

Specifically, a game in which a disaffected hacker with a katana in his trench-coat might team up with an equally disaffected indie rockstar with a pink mowhawk -- and together, they fight commit crime.

[Wardog]

If you could implant a smart phone into your brain and access it freely, would you?

Because in a few years you'd have a crummy old computer stuck inside you and people around you would be walking around with MUCH better equipment. Not only would it become obsolete it will wear down from use, then you'd have to pay to take it out. Unless you're in some super advanced ghost in the shell-esque world a bionic prosthetic won't be better than the biological option.
.

That reminds me of one of the e-mails from the original Deus Ex:


Your mechanical augmentations are NOT obsolete. Some agents express concern that they will be "walking junk" in ten years. One agent expressed their fears in an anonymous e-mail saying "Well be sld at flee markets,. old gray golems for scareing the children. So what about my legss? What about my LIFE?"[sic]

Keep some perspective. Prosthetics remain the only proven technology for enhancing human abilities. Those who make the sacrifice are appreciated, commended, and saluted as heroes.

[ImNotTrevor]

Just in case it wasn't clear previously, all my comments about the viability of exosuits are in the context of a game set in the future.

Specifically, a game in which a disaffected hacker with a katana in his trench-coat might team up with an equally disaffected indie rockstar with a pink mowhawk -- and together, they fight commit crime.

Then why are we saying that's any more or less viable than exosuits?

And the key problem here is that In the Future is based on now.

Unless the methods used for construction change RADICALLY in the future, then we're probably not going to see exo-suit construction workers. I mean, you COULD put pneumatic jackhammers on an exosuit....
But that's needlessly more expensive than just a jackhammer and a dude. Sure, it saves maybe an hour. But an hour of basic human labor is worth about, at worst, 12 bucks including the cost of running the tool. In order to get your worth out of the suit, if it costs 12,000 dollars, you have to use it 1,000 times. That's going to take a LONG time, and more parts means more opportunities to break down. So if a repair on the suit costs 1200 dollars, suddenly you have to use it 10 more times to recoup the cost.

Basically, what you're asking is:
Why aren't there exosuits in cyberpunk?

The answer seems to be:
Because they aren't Cyberpunk enough.

Don't make practicality arguments while arguing for the aesthetic hackers with katanas at the same time. These are two entirely different arguments. One is "What's possible" the other is "What fits this theme?"

So let me answer the second in a way that is more specific:

Because Cyberpunk focuses a LOT on technology being A)Pervasive, B)Unavoidable and C)Eating away at what makes humans Human.

An Exosuit can fit the first of those. But exosuit use is totally avoidable. Just don't get in one. And an exosuit doesn't really reduce your humanity.

Cybernetics can be pervasive. And if you lose an arm, you'll need another. So not as avoidable as an exosuit. And becoming more machine and less man definitely eats away at your humanity. And it's a very OBVIOUS way to show that someone is being consumed and corrupted by technology. This guy is 75% cybernetic. Wow. More machine than man. The themes are present and felt.

This guy wears an exosuit a lot. Like... ALL THE TIME.
Uh...ok. weird, but not inhuman. He's still a person under there. You can use this as someone to be redeemed from the machine, but as an individual event rather than an ongoing theme.

So there you go. Neither pragmatic nor thematic. That's why you don't see soany Exosuits in Cyberpunk.

[Nifft]

Then why are we saying that's any more or less viable than exosuits?
I'm saying that Exosuits can be made to fit into Cyberpunk, alongside the traditional cybernetic prosthetics which we all know and love and we never asked for this.


Unless the methods used for construction change RADICALLY in the future
Yes, they will, just as construction methods have changed RADICALLY with regularity throughout history.

New materials and tools, plus different economic drivers of construction -- no reason to assume the labor force will remain static.


But that's needlessly more expensive than just a jackhammer and a dude. Sure, it saves maybe an hour. But an hour of basic human labor is worth about, at worst, 12 bucks including the cost of running the tool. In order to get your worth out of the suit, if it costs 12,000 dollars, you have to use it 1,000 times. That's going to take a LONG time, and more parts means more opportunities to break down. So if a repair on the suit costs 1200 dollars, suddenly you have to use it 10 more times to recoup the cost.

Basically, what you're asking is:
Why aren't there exosuits in cyberpunk?

The answer seems to be:
Because they aren't Cyberpunk enough.

Don't make practicality arguments while arguing for the aesthetic hackers with katanas at the same time. These are two entirely different arguments. One is "What's possible" the other is "What fits this theme?"

So let me answer the second in a way that is more specific:

Because Cyberpunk focuses a LOT on technology being A)Pervasive, B)Unavoidable and C)Eating away at what makes humans Human.

An Exosuit can fit the first of those. But exosuit use is totally avoidable. Just don't get in one. And an exosuit doesn't really reduce your humanity.

You've got a localized failure of imagination.

Here's how to fit Exosuits into the themes of the genre:



Rico is a {heavy machinery mechanic / construction worker / HVAC repair man / electrician / plumber / drone support / other moderately skilled manual technician}.

The job sucks, like all fungible labor jobs in a corporate enclave.

Maybe Rico got injured, and instead of taking medical leave (which goes on your permanent record and makes you less desirable as an employee) he's given an opportunity to keep working but wear an ExoSuit.

Maybe he's getting old (over 30) and he can't keep up with the trolls, kids, & ex-soliders who have implants.

Maybe everyone at the job site was required to wear an ExoSuit.

Whatever the reason, he leases a Sony™ WalkManpower® ExoSuit. It's pretty sweet, at first: his girlfriend jokes that he's moving up in the world, now that he's wearing a Suit to work.

But it turns out to be oppressive and dehumanizing! How? Pick one or more of the following:

- When ${SECURITY_BREACH} happens, his whole section gets locked down, their exosuits remote-disable and paralyzed. It turns out the suit he's paying for is also a prison cell.

- He uses AR (augmented reality) to repair / service / ${MAINTENANCE} newer models of ${JOB_TECH}, which works nicely in conjunction with his exosuit, until he sees that his own special tricks are starting to appear in the AR procedural database. He's just become conscious that he's a thin layer of meat between the knowledge (AR) and the physical capability to use the knowledge (the Suit), and his value decreases by the day.

- When important customers tour the area, his suit gets remote-piloted ("for security"). Sometimes they make him dance.


There. Solved.

I thought this was obvious -- but who knows, maybe it's all original and I'm discovering something totally new which none-the-less perfectly fits the genre. (But IMHO originality is unlikely here.)

Actually, I'm pretty sure I've seen exosuits in Cyberpunk-ish media before, though not as often as implants & cyber prosthetics for sure.



This guy wears an exosuit a lot. Like... ALL THE TIME.
Uh...ok. weird, but not inhuman. He's still a person under there. You can use this as someone to be redeemed from the machine, but as an individual event rather than an ongoing theme.


The wheelman / escape care driver does not drive a car ALL THE TIME, because that would be stupid. He'd need very special bathrooms, for one thing.

Yet being really good at driving a car is a core part of his archetype.

The fallacy you're making here is a false binary.

[jok]

Thats easy:
Since this is dystiopian cyberpunk, lepra 2.0 as a bioweapon or evil corp accident is released, no cheap way to regrow limbs exits.
Done.

[Submortimer]

I don't know if this has been mentioned yet, but taking a look at Fallout 4 and how that handles power armor should give you the answer you're looking for: power.

In general, an exosuit, power armor, whatever you want to call it is several hundred, if not a couple thousand, pounds of metal. Frame, armor plating, servos, hydraulics and pneumatics, fluid systems...the list goes on. It's really pretty similar to wearing a car, and that has a big limiting factor: you gotta have a lot of juice to move that much metal around.

If you're lucky, you live in a society sufficiently advanced enough to develop something like the Fusion Core, a highly energy dense, easily carried, more or less readily available power source that's strong enough to move a suit around, at least for a couple hours. This is cyberpunk, though, so we'really probably looking at something more akin to a big ass battery pack. Considering the best we can do right now is LiOH battery cells, you're probably not gonna do much better, and those type of cells are crazy heavy. You're even worse off (and It might, in fact, be impossible) if you're forced to rely on gas or some other type of fossil fuel to run your rig. In any case, portable power sources add even more weight, and only let you operate for a limited period of time.

The Non-Independently-portable option is tethered operating: hook a big ol' cable up from your butt to a stationary energy source, and maybe have an on board emergency backup power cell; alternatly, in an industrial enviroment, the suits could be powered directly through the floor or ceiling like a Bumper Kart. This, obviously, also has its downsides, in that your operating range is severely limited, and the bad guys don't even have to shoot you to take you out; at least, if they can get to your power source.

Cybernetics and bionic are kind of inherently assumed to be powered by the body itself, and are much, much lighter to boot: you gain increased speed and concealability at far reduced power costs, and in return you give up the dream of being a walking tank.

In any case, in a Cyberpunk setting, you certainly shouldn't have people running around in Mjolnier Armor or accurately pretending to be Mobile Infrantry, but that doesn't mean you can't have ANY sort of power armor.

[Submortimer]

Rico is a {heavy machinery mechanic / construction worker / HVAC repair man / electrician / plumber / drone support / other moderately skilled manual technician}.


Nice sub-orbital name drop, by the way.

[Mr. Mask]

Not sure you could get a bio-electric system on a human that's as efficient as strapping on a two pound battery.

[Submortimer]

Not sure you could get a bio-electric system on a human that's as efficient as strapping on a two pound battery.

Well, this IS fiction. And, as was stated before, it's not about what's realistic or feasible, it's about what fits the theme.

[Coidzor]

Cybernetics and bionic are kind of inherently assumed to be powered by the body itself, and are much, much lighter to boot: you gain increased speed and concealability at far reduced power costs, and in return you give up the dream of being a walking tank.

I'm not so sure that mechanical arms and the like are assumed to be powered by the body itself instead of having their own self-contained power systems. Certainly some cybernetics are stated to be powered off of food energy or bioelectrics, but not all of them as a baseline assumption you can just go with from series to series or universe to universe.

[Segev]

If you can power cybernetics that are several hundred pounds of metal and other materials in high-powered prosthetics off the human body, then you could design a very simple "bio-plug" that could allow you to plug an exo-suit into the body to power off of it the same way. So that's not a strong argument against exo-suits.

[Cluedrew]

It should be noted however that such a "bio-plug" would probably be cybernetics itself. I suppose you could have some sort of wrap with hundreds of micro needles that you could put on and take off, but I feel a implant that extracts the bio-fuel from you would work better. I have no science behind that, but by my simple conjectures and the feel of cyberpunk it would work better.

[Nifft]

I'm not so sure that mechanical arms and the like are assumed to be powered by the body itself instead of having their own self-contained power systems. Certainly some cybernetics are stated to be powered off of food energy or bioelectrics, but not all of them as a baseline assumption you can just go with from series to series or universe to universe.

In Shadowrun, I think power supplies are generally hand-waved away, but plugging your limbs in to recharge sure does seem thematic.

In terms of power supply size & weight, I think in most systems some kind of non-biological drone bodies can be built which have equivalent weight-to-strength ratios as human limbs, so clearly (in those systems) cybernetics could be built to function on a power supply that doesn't throw off the weight ratio too much as compared to a normal human.

But being built to use bio-power also sounds cool.

[Coidzor]

Heck, you could even crib off the matrix with the human batteries angle if you really wanted to.

[Segev]

Heck, you could even crib off the matrix with the human batteries angle if you really wanted to.

That explanation never made sense. Even if "body heat" were the most efficient source of energy, cattle would've been wiser. Kill those fractious humans and replace them with larger meat-sacks that don't fight back even if you don't provide them the perfect balance of hope and misery in a virtual world.

[Cluedrew]

My guess for that is some left over part of the "get along with humans" code made them want to keep humans around, but now they wanted them out of the way. The power generation was there own rationalization of that after they had rebelled.

Of course, I'm making that up, it is part of no official cannon as far as I know.

[Nifft]

Heck, you could even crib off the matrix with the human batteries angle if you really wanted to.
Ugh, please no. I prefer that sci-fi at least allow highschool level thermodynamics to remain valid.


That explanation never made sense. Even if "body heat" were the most efficient source of energy, cattle would've been wiser. Kill those fractious humans and replace them with larger meat-sacks that don't fight back even if you don't provide them the perfect balance of hope and misery in a virtual world.
Yeah, I'd been hoping that the Matrix was run on some kind of emotional psychic energy bull****onium. That would have justified the hopeless prison which was the world in a much more satisfying way.

Also, of course, under that formulation Keanu == Madoka.

[Milo v3]

Yeah, I'd been hoping that the Matrix was run on some kind of emotional psychic energy bull****onium. That would have justified the hopeless prison which was the world in a much more satisfying way.
Yeah... I really wished they were allowed to use their original idea of "Humans are used as the hardware for the matrix since brains are the most effective computers we know of." but the executives thought the audience wouldn't get it. :smallsigh:

[Nifft]

Yeah... I really wished they were allowed to use their original idea of "Humans are used as the hardware for the matrix since brains are the most effective computers we know of." but the executives thought the audience wouldn't get it. :smallsigh:

Oh man, that would have been so much better.

And that idea is totally applicable to this topic, so double-yay.

Application: human proprioception and spatial awareness are better than what machines can do, therefore it's the human's job to get the Rig safely into position so the Rig can do whatever technical maintenance stuff it has to do. That leverages biological strengths (overall area perception, spacial perception, intuitive safety / danger categorization), gives an excuse for human-shaped mechs (proprioception), and the balance of power vs. responsibility is more than a little bit degrading for the human.

[Segev]

When I saw the end of the second Matrix movie, where Neo did the "shutdown" move at the robot-squids in the real world, my immediate thought was, "Oh, man, they're still in the matrix."

That would have, I think, been an exquisite plot twist: that even Zion and its "even worse" crapsack world of hardship and shortages, of war and primal fear for survival, is just an expression of what Agent Smith said about the reason the matrix is such a lousy virtual world to live in: humans don't accept idyl. They balk at it. So the machines made a lousy, miserable one.

Besides, what better way to ensure that your would-be revolutionaries never escape? Make them think they have, and that they're now fighting to free others. When in reality...they're all still in the lotus eater machine.

That doesn't address the silliness of "humans as batteries," but the "humans as computing devices" explanation would've worked nicely. Heck, some really freaky existentialist explorations of the nature of human consciousness and "machine" consciousness would be available, there: if the machines' code is running on human-brain hardware, that means that the machine intelligences are effectively collective dreams of humankind. To some degree, they are, themselves, human, just shared across multiple brains rather than confined to a single one. And yet, alien, due to being designed entirely differently than the normal human consciousness.

[Coidzor]

Humans as batteries almost makes sense when you think about them wanting to appear wasteful or going the extra mile just to be cruel.

Like, say, particularly dastardly megacorps.

[Eldan]

When I saw the end of the second Matrix movie, where Neo did the "shutdown" move at the robot-squids in the real world, my immediate thought was, "Oh, man, they're still in the matrix."

That would have, I think, been an exquisite plot twist: that even Zion and its "even worse" crapsack world of hardship and shortages, of war and primal fear for survival, is just an expression of what Agent Smith said about the reason the matrix is such a lousy virtual world to live in: humans don't accept idyl. They balk at it. So the machines made a lousy, miserable one.

Besides, what better way to ensure that your would-be revolutionaries never escape? Make them think they have, and that they're now fighting to free others. When in reality...they're all still in the lotus eater machine.

That doesn't address the silliness of "humans as batteries," but the "humans as computing devices" explanation would've worked nicely. Heck, some really freaky existentialist explorations of the nature of human consciousness and "machine" consciousness would be available, there: if the machines' code is running on human-brain hardware, that means that the machine intelligences are effectively collective dreams of humankind. To some degree, they are, themselves, human, just shared across multiple brains rather than confined to a single one. And yet, alien, due to being designed entirely differently than the normal human consciousness.

The thermodynamics thing is adressable in two ways.
The first one, to quote:


MORPHEUS: Where did you hear about the laws of thermodynamics, Neo?

NEO: Anyone who's made it past one science class in high school ought to know about the laws of thermodynamics!

MORPHEUS: Where did you go to high school, Neo?

(Pause.)

NEO: ...in the Matrix.

Is of course rather silly and handwavy. The other explanation combines with the "still in the Matrix" explanation above. The humans only know they are being kept alive as batteries since presumably, some broke out and saw it. Of course, the machines could have shown them whatever they wanted if the real world is still fake.

[Keltest]

Humans as batteries almost makes sense when you think about them wanting to appear wasteful or going the extra mile just to be cruel.

Like, say, particularly dastardly megacorps.

As Red Fel will no doubt be pleased to remind you, nobody intelligent is going to go out of their way to be deliberately cruel unless there is some benefit in doing so. Mr Dastardly Megacorp Chairman isn't going to think "Lets use people for our batteries instead of this readily available fuel that is more efficient and more readily available." because being wasteful is in opposition to making Dastardly Megacorp the biggest and most powerful megacorp. So if people are being used as fuel, they need to be the best darn fuel you've ever had. Which is still silly, because it shouldn't be all that difficult to figure out what it is about people that makes good fuel and make more of it that isn't alive (or at least sentient.) If they cant do that, then youre basically running Dastardly Megacorp on black magic at that point, which is somewhat less thematically appropriate.

[ImNotTrevor]

I'm saying that Exosuits can be made to fit into Cyberpunk, alongside the traditional cybernetic prosthetics which we all know and love and we never asked for this.
Sure they can. Never said they couldn't. Just stated why they aren't yet.


Yes, they will, just as construction methods have changed RADICALLY with regularity throughout history.
Have they?
Bulding a building in 1400's:
1. Lay foundation.
2. Build frame of building.
3. Build basic internal structure (floors)
4. Put the walls on.
[Depending on specific circumstances, switch 3 and 4.]

Building a building in 2016:
1.Lay foundation.
2. Build frame of building.
3. Build basic internal structure. (Floors, air conditioning, plumbing, wiring.)
4. Put walls on.
[Depending on specific circumstances, switch 3 and 4.]

We added some stuff to step 3 and we got fancy new materials to do all this with and new ways to stick them together. But all in all... it's basically the same thing. Just like how the Internal Combustion engine is still basically the same thing as it always was. New bells and whistles attached, but the way the thing WORKS is basically the same.


New materials and tools, plus different economic drivers of construction -- no reason to assume the labor force will remain static.

New materials aren't really that huge of a game changer in How to Make Building 101. They allow us to do really neat new shapes and build taller, mpre safe structures..... but the basic steps are pretty much the same.


You've got a localized failure of imagination.

Here's how to fit Exosuits into the themes of the genre:

[indent]
Rico is a {heavy machinery mechanic / construction worker / HVAC repair man / electrician / plumber / drone support / other moderately skilled manual technician}.

The job sucks, like all fungible labor jobs in a corporate enclave.

Maybe Rico got injured, and instead of taking medical leave (which goes on your permanent record and makes you less desirable as an employee) he's given an opportunity to keep working but wear an ExoSuit.

Maybe he's getting old (over 30) and he can't keep up with the trolls, kids, & ex-soliders who have implants.

Maybe everyone at the job site was required to wear an ExoSuit.

Whatever the reason, he leases a Sony™ WalkManpower® ExoSuit. It's pretty sweet, at first: his girlfriend jokes that he's moving up in the world, now that he's wearing a Suit to work.

But it turns out to be oppressive and dehumanizing! How? Pick one or more of the following:

Alternative option: Get Implants. *shrug*


- When ${SECURITY_BREACH} happens, his whole section gets locked down, their exosuits remote-disable and paralyzed. It turns out the suit he's paying for is also a prison cell.
Are elevators that shut down dehumanizing? Then neither is this. Inconvenient, yup. Nightmare for claustrophobics? Yup. Dehumanizing? Not even slightly.


- He uses AR (augmented reality) to repair / service / ${MAINTENANCE} newer models of ${JOB_TECH}, which works nicely in conjunction with his exosuit, until he sees that his own special tricks are starting to appear in the AR procedural database. He's just become conscious that he's a thin layer of meat between the knowledge (AR) and the physical capability to use the knowledge (the Suit), and his value decreases by the day.
This can't happen without the exosuit? (Cameras record his tricks, he sees a newbie doing the same tricks and finds out they're in the training manual. The exosuit doesn't really make this possible. Just makes it easier to spot, I guess. The exosuit doesn't really bring anything new to the narrative.


- When important customers tour the area, his suit gets remote-piloted ("for security"). Sometimes they make him dance.
Wow. That's a stretch. And it's the only one that is both dehumanizing and requires an exosuit.


There. Solved.
Not even close. I don't know if you realize what it takes to bring in exosuits in a way that will make them feel cyberpunky.

1. They have to feel pervasive. Everywhere. Even outside of work. And it needs to feel not-stupid that they are everywhere.

2. They have to actually strip away one's humanity. Make them less human. And/or slave them to The Machine (corporate or literal.)

3. They have to do this in a way that only they can do, or that feels significantly different from cybernetics, or else they become "Cybernetics you wear as clothes." Or "Drones you can wear!"

The difficulty comes from number 3. It creates an air of "Exosuits or Cybernetics. Pick one."


I thought this was obvious -- but who knows, maybe it's all original and I'm discovering something totally new which none-the-less perfectly fits the genre. (But IMHO originality is unlikely here.)
Nah. I'm sure there's cyberpunk with exosuits. But cybernetics are, I can nearly guarantee, more downplayed.


Actually, I'm pretty sure I've seen exosuits in Cyberpunk-ish media before, though not as often as implants & cyber prosthetics for sure.
Yup. The two don't mix well. They step on eachothers toes and become sorta the same thing.



The wheelman / escape care driver does not drive a car ALL THE TIME, because that would be stupid. He'd need very special bathrooms, for one thing.

Yet being really good at driving a car is a core part of his archetype.

The fallacy you're making here is a false binary.

False Binary requires that I make it only one of two choices. I simply said you can't argue an aesthetics point from practicality, or vice versa. They're two different battlefields. I said, basically, "Choose the basis of the argument and stick with it."
That comment was directed more at the thread generally than any one person. It's my bad that it didn't come across that way.

As for Driver guy... he's not exclusively cyberpunk, though, is he?
Hacker with a mohawk and a katana who plugs his brain into building security is pretty exclusive to cyberpunk.

Guy who drives really good, no, seriously, REALLY good.... is not. (Unless the Transporter movies and the Fast and Furious series became hallmarks of Cyberpunk while I wasn't looking.)

Now, Guy who spends all day working in his garage on his own car and several mob boss cars with illegal upgrades and uses an army of remote drones to help him... That's getting pretty Cyberpunk. Especially if he also Drives Real Good. And has green hair. (To get that healthy dose of Punk with his Cyber.)


As far as why exosuits aren't common: They're hard to make dehumanizing. Harder than cybernetics, anyway. Exosuits can be subtly dehumanizing, absolutely. But Cyberpunk is rarely subtle with its themes. (When was the last time you saw anything with the Punk suffix that was subtle, for that matter?)

Can it be done? Sure.

Just don't expect it to be looked at any differently than cybernetics. In fact it will probably be seen as Cybernetics Light or Drones as Clothes.
(Which are also the two ways I would approach their stats for an rpg, now that I think about it)

TL;DR
Exosuits are cybernetics-lite. And...that's about the extent of it.

[Coidzor]

As Red Fel will no doubt be pleased to remind you, nobody intelligent is going to go out of their way to be deliberately cruel unless there is some benefit in doing so. Mr Dastardly Megacorp Chairman isn't going to think "Lets use people for our batteries instead of this readily available fuel that is more efficient and more readily available." because being wasteful is in opposition to making Dastardly Megacorp the biggest and most powerful megacorp. So if people are being used as fuel, they need to be the best darn fuel you've ever had. Which is still silly, because it shouldn't be all that difficult to figure out what it is about people that makes good fuel and make more of it that isn't alive (or at least sentient.) If they cant do that, then youre basically running Dastardly Megacorp on black magic at that point, which is somewhat less thematically appropriate.

You, of course, realize there are things like punishment details and other situations where they're doing something to twist the knife rather than because it actually provides sufficient power. And there's always execs who find little ways to be cruel because that's how they get their kicks and is a major part of why and how they became an exec.

[Nifft]

Sure they can. Never said they couldn't. Just stated why they aren't yet. Okay, so when you said this:


So there you go. Neither pragmatic nor thematic. That's why you don't see soany Exosuits in Cyberpunk. ... you didn't actually mean that there aren't any, nor did you mean that they're not thematic.

You just meant that they're not quite as common.

Is that accurate?

[Git777]

The augments make you lose humanity and so become less of a good person rule always seemed like a stupid concept to me. Can you imagine if someone in your every day life suggested that you don't trust someone else as they have a pacemaker and are there fore evil? You would distance your self from the head case wouldn't you? That's how I feel about the humanity system in cyberpunk.
I do like Exoskeletons though!

[ImNotTrevor]

Okay, so when you said this:

... you didn't actually mean that there aren't any, nor did you mean that they're not thematic.

You just meant that they're not quite as common.

Is that accurate?

That was a typo. It was supposed to read: "That's why you don't see so many exosuits..."

And they're... kinda thematic. With some elbow grease. I mean, just being high-tech does not cyberpunk make. Cyberpunk focuses on the fusion of machine and man, often by forcing man to make himself part machine. (Thus a really huge smack in the face for "technology eats away at humanity.")

The exosuit... kiiiinda does this? But no better than cyberware or brain-hackers or brain-drone-controllers do, and those have been staples of the genre for a longer space of time.

So it's easier to justify the familiar and easy, than the new and difficult-with-low-payoff, thematically.

Like, you could have a setting with 87 kinds of dracoform critters. Manticores and drakes and dragons and Wyrms and all manner of different sorts, but depending on the themes, that might be less helpful than just having Dragons, especially if the difference is "this one is blue with green stripes, that one is green with blue stripes."

Does that make more sense? You don't see them because the narrative and thematic payoff is no better than cyberware has, but it's harder to make fit.