More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Families with nothing would sometimes sell their toddlers to indenture schools, where managers trained them to be submissive just like they were programming a bot. At least bots could earn their way out of ownership after a while, be upgraded, and go fully autonomous. Humans might earn their way out, but there was no autonomy key that could undo a childhood like that.
Wow... ain’t the future fun...
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
...more
Social politics
Nothing made her want to strip a man naked more than knowing he had good ideas
Amen to that
She was designed to look human, her face the replica of a woman whose image Med’s tissue engineer had licensed from an old Facebook database.
Well, you look at that 😂
Her goggles chattered silently to their own loopback interface, sending no data beyond the device itself.
I’m getting lost with all the lingo. I get the general picture well enough but having to deal with paragraphs of garbled narrative is starting to make me feel discouraged 😞
“We live in a world where everyone can live for over a century without disease and without pain!” Behind her, the Pills used a metal-eating bacteria to soften the locks and rip open the cargo containers like paper. “But the keys to this good life are held in the greedy hands of a few corps, whose patent terms last longer than a human life. If they won’t open access to medicine, we’re going to smash it open! The time has come to fight this system that calls health a privilege!”
Oh, the realness of it all
When you’re competing for jobs with people who take it, Zacuity could mean the difference between employment and unemployment.”
Ah, the Guthrie. When getting a job means you need drugs to enhance productivity
“Most bots are built like that, yes. Especially ones whose manufacturers need them for a specific task, and who aren’t planning to let them mature to autonomy anyway. But a lot of roboticists believe that successful autonomous bots need kinship ties, and a period of childhood where they can experiment with different identities.
The road was smooth, probably from a recent refoaming. Lakes tended to move around up here, depending on precipitation, so the local towns preferred roads that would biodegrade quickly. When a lake ate the road, they just sprayed a different route around its new banks.
Wow
Loving all the possibilities on this future
“Now, as you can see, the drug is stimulating his dopamine receptors. There’s your pleasure bang. But just watch, because the drug is doing something else, too.” The tulips began to wither and shrink. Soon, there were half as many dopamine receptors on screen. “Zacuity is reducing the number of dopamine receptors on the neurons in the midbrain and prefrontal cortex. And this is really the key. Doing this interferes with decision-making, and makes the brain extremely vulnerable to addiction. As he loses more and more of those receptors, he gets more addicted to the specific thing he did while
...more
Explained in a way we all get it - like 👌🏼
people who dose themselves basically become manic. They refuse to do anything but engage in whatever process they associate with that dopamine reward. They don’t eat, sleep, or drink water. These deaths aren’t from the drug itself—they’re side effects from things like dehydration, injury, and organ failure. Of course, people also have to take more and more of the Zacuity to get their rush, so that makes everything worse.”
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.
Hmm... AI, yes, but with precautions
The bot’s whole body spasmed, his reflexes made useless by bogus and contradictory commands. A wave of ecstatic nonsense gripped him and the file ended.
Who would know there’d be such a thing as bot drugs? Quite original 👌🏼
students loved their work at Free Lab so much that they came here when they weren’t in class, first thing in the morning, just to find something “intriguing” to research. It had been a long time since she’d worked on a drug project with people doing it for the thrill of discovery. 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.
Isn’t that the one million dollar question we all ponder upon all our lives? 😌
Everybody is an outsider, if you go deep enough. The trick is reassuring people that you’re their kind of outsider.”
Awww... so true and valid for all the misfits, nerds and antisocials out there 😌
he likes you because you’re dealing with the same problem. Just figure out a way to share their problems.”
Nothing like hardship to bond people together 😉
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.
Coming from one of the only places in the world where bots were born autonomous, Med had this feeling a lot. It kept her from forming friendships with other bots in the lab. How could she understand them, when she’d always been autonomous? She felt like her bot identity was incomplete without that seminal experience, but at the same time, it didn’t make humans seem any less alien.
A whole new species
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.
In one frantic day of work, Jack finished the press release that Krish had started.
So that’s it? We’re gonna wrap up now? Everything neatly and with a bow on top? Wth
At last, she knew what it felt like to own the totality of her experiences. A profound silence settled around the edges of her mind, more powerful than a defensive perimeter in battle. Nobody could find out what she was thinking, unless she allowed it. The key to autonomy, she realized, was more than root access on the programs that shaped her desires. It was a sense of privacy.
