Autonomous

by Annalee Newitz

There were entire text repositories that focused on eliminating the indenture of humans. Their pundits argued that humans should not be owned like bots because nobody paid to make them. Bots, who cost money, required a period of indenture to make their manufacture worthwhile. No such incentive was required for humans to make other humans.

she had to admit that the patent system did seem to be at the root of a lot of social problems. Only people with money could benefit from new medicine. Therefore, only the haves could remain physically healthy, while the have-nots couldn’t keep their minds sharp enough to work the good jobs, and didn’t generally live beyond a hundred. Plus, the cycle was passed down unfairly through families. The people who couldn’t afford patented meds were likely to have sickly, short-lived children who became indentured and never got out. Jack could see Krish’s point about how a lot of basic problems could be fixed if only patent licensing were reformed.

Their chance came when a massive ship docked at Halifax, its cargo containers packed with pharma that had been fabbed in the African Federation. It was bad enough that people in the Federation were making drugs for people in the Zone that they couldn’t afford themselves. But in the past year there had been a record number of deaths in the Federation from childhood neurological disorders, several varieties of cancer, and infectious fatigue syndrome. The meds on the ship could be saving hundreds of thousands of Federation lives right now. Instead, they would be warehoused in the Zone.

These feelings came from programs that ran in a part of his mind that he couldn’t access. He was a user of his own consciousness, but he did not have owner privileges. As a result, Paladin felt many things without knowing why.

Usually her lab teams were motivated by death or money, half-crazed with a desire to cure the former and bathe in giant tanks of the latter. She wasn’t sure which motivation made better fuel for innovation: naïve but ethical beliefs, or the need to survive.

Everybody is an outsider, if you go deep enough. The trick is reassuring people that you’re their kind of outsider.”

When Lyle’s friends walked into the Broadway Noodle House on Saturday night, all modded and gussied up, they were a game world come to life. Their gleaming ultralight armor and festive textiles always got attention. They got more attention still when, around midnight, they arrived at their true destination: a clubhouse for hackers called Buried Spaceship.

Paladin knew that human gender was part of sexual desire. But he was starting to perceive that gender was a way of seeing the world, too. Military bots, especially ones with armored bodies like Paladin’s, were almost always called “he.” People assigned genders based on behaviors and work roles, often ignoring anatomy. Gender was a form of social recognition. That’s why humans had given him a gender before he even had a name.

it was popular for conservatives to claim that putting geneng into the hands of the public would result in mega-viruses or total species collapse. Open data would be the gateway to a runaway synthetic biology apocalypse. But now we know there has been no one great disaster—only the slow-motion disaster of capitalism converting every living thing and idea into property.

The key to autonomy, she realized, was more than root access on the programs that shaped her desires. It was a sense of privacy.