Adult Recombinant Technology is becoming Real

 

TL;DR: Our biopunk future is becoming real faster than I expected. Techniques which use genetically engineered viruses to insert custom proteins to correct a medical condition are now in clinical trials in China. And I want people to move away from a cyberpunk vision of cutting the body and adding things and move towards a vision of changing the nature of a person's body.

Way back in 2009 I proposed a monograph to the TTRPG publisher Chaosium. This was the start of Rubble and Ruin, my first (and currently only) table top RPG. The original was published by Chaosium (but is now out of print) although I am self publishing an improved edition on Drivethrurpg. Rubble and Ruin is a near future science fiction / post apocalyptic game that tries to recreate the vibe of “cannon fantasy” but in a reasonably hard sci-fi setting. 

And one of the things that has been in this setting from the beginning is what I call ART or Adult Recombinant Technology.

What is ART. I make no claim to be the first to think of this, it was obvious to any molecular biologist who thought about the subject at least as far back as twenty years ago; We should be able to alter the expressed genome in adult humans by building targeted viruses that insert the required new genetics only into those cells that need the change. It is just a matter of figuring out what exactly causes the problem of interest, what exact genetic changes are needed, and how to build a “vector” (fancy word of custom virus) to deliver it only where needed.

I have always felt that we will start with medically important problems and then branch out into “desired not required” biological changes. I expect cosmetic changes will be the first “non medical” uses of this technology. Changing your physical shape or skin color seem likely places humanity will start.

ART is becoming Real. I expected that we would start seeing the first medical applications of ART in the 2030s. I was wrong! I read this morning that there are several clinical trials started in China that are what I would call ART. Here is the link to the story I read.

And that makes me think of the differences between biopunk and cyberpunk.

Cyberpunk and Body Images. Most people who think about cyberpunk and sci-fi cybernetics (not what Norbert was talking about), think about cutting off body parts and replacing them with enhanced mechanical equivalents. For many people, the "rule of cool" beats basic neural science. 

The main “body image” from the 1980s until today seems to be that “humans have an immutable body” and we can cut it up and add changes across function systems. For example, “we can cut of a hand and add a mechanical hand with a gun in it”. We can remove an eye and add a different eye, maybe one that can see infra red.

For me, cybernetics have two problems, biological rejection and neuronal control. The first is a material science problem and I can imagine someone finding a material that can be connected to the interior of a human body, that is strong and flexible enough to meet specific needs, and is invisible to the immune system. I can imagine that. It is the seconds problem, how will the body control it, that has always fascinated me.

In my games I have always had ideas like, “maybe we can add a lens that hides above the eye and that can be pulled down and allows IR vision”. This is the idea of enhancing existing biological systems by adding a new item that improves its function. But, importantly, this item does not need a lot of direct neurological control.

Aside. Way back in the 1980s I had two different ideas that I used in my Aftermath! games. You could build new neural connections in the correct parts of the peripheral nervous system, or you could interface things to small parts of muscles and train the cyborg to control the machine separate from the body original body part.

A new Body Image. What I want people to do when they think of ART is to think about how we can modify complete, currently functional, biological systems, like your body. For example, I have long imagined that there is a reasonably simple genetic switch that can change human skeletal muscle strength. If such a thing exists, then we should be able to make a form of ART which when injected into an adult human, it will increase their physical strength. Of course, to greatly increase a person’s strength you will need to also improve many other subsystems—bones, ligaments, etc. But one little shot gives someone an athletic edge... a +2 STR for most TTRPGs ... I could see it happening. And apparently, happening soon.

As always, thank you for taking the time to read this and I always welcome comments of questions—let’s be honest, I’m a nerd screaming into the digital void, I love any sort feedback.

Solarpunk Traveller #5

 

The Big Picture

TL;DR. In this post, I try to pull together what an actual solarpunk Traveller adventure would actually look like. At a high level and focusing on games that would appeal to the average “traditional” Traveller player. What I did not do, is focus on “cozy sci fi” which is something I think Traveller could do—and maybe I’ll talk about that later.

 

This is post #5, the first four are  #1, #2, #3, and #4.

 

Welcome to Solarpunk Traveller. In this setting, the Imperials are the “Good Guys”. They regulate interstellar commerce allowing the free, but profitable flow of knowledge within Imperial Space. They prevent the willful enslavement of others. They regulate the standards used to create technology and they protect the borders from those who wish to destroy what humanity has made.

Tech Aside: Technology doesn’t just work. It requires coordination. A common modern example might be cars and fuel. There are big cars and little cars. There cars made by this country and that country, but they all are built to use a standardized fuel—or at least one of a small set of standardized fuels. Likewise, in Solarpunk Traveller, starships are built around standards. If the players capture an enemy ship with a really cool triple laser turret, they can sell their old single pulse laser and swap in the new one. It doesn’t matter which Imperial world made the ship or the salvaged turret, only that they conform to Imperial standards. From there it is just engineering to swap the two. Traveller has always had a “Do-it-yourself” or solarpunk view of technology.

The corollary being that a megacorp can’t ship through interstellar space turrets that only work on the starships they built. This creates sustainable technology which can be adapted to meet the differing needs of people across the Empire.

 Individual planets and star systems are autonomous political units. Most exist to look after the welfare of their citizens. Some follow highly restrictive beliefs while others are welcoming and friendly. Some are prosperous with new people continuously immigrating, bringing with them highly qualified personnel with rare and valuable knowledge, while others are slowly dying under the weight of their own stupidity. The Empire allows this, with one restriction, people are free to use their own wealth to leave, if they wish.

Social Equity Aside: Traveller has always been like this. People can come and go from planets—there are a few that the Empire has isolated. The Traveller’s Aid Society has labeled these as Red Zones and a few TAS advises folks to not visit (Amber zones), but generally the population is free to travel as they wish between worlds. Traveller has always had this element of social equity. Sure, there are unjust worlds, but they are the exception, not the rule.

Most of the Empire is full of star systems with spaceports full of people coming and going, travelling between worlds for business or pleasure. Few of these people carry weapons, because they are not needed. In general, Traveller has always rejected pessimism. Only on the edges are things ill-defined or dangerous.

In Traveller, the Empire has always been made of communities focusing on particular needs. Planets or star systems have governments focusing on the needs of the people living there. The Traveller’s Aid Society is a community of affluent people who work to make their travels easier—and also help non-members at the same time. Corporations are communities of people working to build and sell goods and services. The Scouts are a community of people interested in (and support by the Empire to) exploring the edges of Imperial Space.

So, what kind of adventures can we have in such a world?

The adventure Tarsus just works out of the literal box as a solarpunk adventure. A citizen has a problem with her inheritance, and a group of her friends help her sort out the trade relations with different communities. Depending on the players, violence may or may not be very important in resolving the problems. Here are some ideas.

Diplomatic Spies. Maybe the players are a team sent from Milagro (a minor world in District 268)  to see if they can’t open relations with Lydia (a small, xenophobic world just inside the empire in Glistin). This could be a highly roleplaying, diplomatic game which would not be most players’ preference, except that the nearby world of Grote is offering the player characters good money to also learn the secret to Lydian tea which is highly regarded in many noble homes.

Trouble Shooters. The players could be a team of trouble shooters for the Imperial Bureau of Standards who are sent from world to world on missions to investigate corporate wrong-doings. Not the legal kind, that is the parties NPC sidekicks who are all lawyers and accountants. No, the parties job is to sneak (or fight) their way into restricted spaces and extract evidence of illegal activity. This remote outpost might be a “chop shop” converting stolen Zhodani technology to work within imperial standards. That planet might be using radioactive paint on the faces of their stylish watches. All sorts of “spy adventures” are possible.

Human Rights Protectorate. The Traveller’s Aid Society spends most of its time worrying about its member’s comfort, but they are a huge organization with a lot of money, and an invested interest in keeping the empire strong. So, they might have a secret organization of their own trouble shooters who investigate allegations of slavery, forced labor, and other illegal activities. These teams might be sent to all sorts of nasty places to investigate all sorts of unpleasant groups. And it would be easy to imaging more typical players jumping in  such games.

This week we are investigating a claim that this remote oligarchy is genetically manipulating their citizens to create low-intelligence laborers who are unable to ever leave the system. Next week it is a corporation that kidnaps poor children and raises them as mindless killers.

Of course, the group can be all these things. The player characters could simply be a trusted team with a starship that is hired for different missions. The key to making it solarpunk (IMHO) is focusing on the basics. Refusing pessimism. The players are out to effect positive change in the world. Sustainable, “do-it-yourself” technology. The players are not shipping around a few boxes of mindless junk from one world to the next, trying to make a payment on their personal debt. They control assets (particularly a starship) that is given to them by their community with the understanding that they will use it for good. And social equity, they are doing good in their world. They are not chasing this month’s mortgage payment. They are chasing people who are taking advantage of others. They are chasing those who violate the community standards that define the empire. And hopefully they are having interesting adventures as they do it!

 

As always, thank you for taking the time to read this, and please feel free to leave comments or questions below.

 

Solarpunk Traveller #4: Technology and Corporations

TL;DR. Human technology does not require corporate ownership of intellectual property and capitalist investment to thrive. Technological advancement requires people with different skill sets to work together towards a common goal. Yes, this can be funded by the wealthy for the soul purpose of increasing their wealth, but it is not required. In fact, in an open setting, capitals protection of intellectual property could be very restricted, and technology would do just fine. And, the core Traveller mechanics already model this structure. In other words, Traveller technology is already solarpunk.

This is part four of a (very slowly) developing thread about what a solarpunk Traveller game would look like. The others are found here. Solarpunk Traveller #1, #2, and #3.

There is a TV commercial called "Dear Alice". It's somewhat famous amongst the solarpunk community and for many people it defines both the solarpunk aesthetic and solarpunk technology. I'm going to assume you've watched it--here's a link:

In Dear Alice, an unseen grandmother has left a small farm or agricultural business to Alice, along with some advice. We learn that “the land is more than just dirt. If you look after it, it will feed you forever.” Now remember a couple of posts ago I was babbling on about why people would go into space. Many people are travelling to find a new home where they can establish themselves forever. Of course, the settlers don’t expect to life forever, not in Dear Alice and not in the Traveller universe. But they expect people to live forever in the place they are creating.

This solarpunk vision is not anti-technology. The people of the land show use all sorts of sophisticated equipment to provide for themselves and others. They have robotic harvesters and flying wind turbines and cool micro-rain generators.

But they also have upgraded their wooden barns with advanced materials (at least, that’s what it looks like to me) and their robot carries a cloth sack when picking fruit. They use their technology and adapt it to their needs.

This is not an anti-technology vision. Technology is accepted as one of the core elements of human existence. It is what we do. But it is not the only thing we do. We also live in community. Remember, we are told, “a business is only as good as its people”. So treat them well. We have technology, we have a culture of reuse and adaptation, we have a concern for community, but we also have one other thing. We know that Alice is “a smart one” and she will be “okay, come rain or shine”. The last element we have are what Canadians like to call HQP, or Highly Qualified Personnel.

Not everyone can know everything. In fact, in Dear Alice, we know there are people who are struggling, because we see her farm preparing a crate load of food for “donation”. We don’t know who gets it, or why they need it, but we know she is donating some of her produce. All that advanced technology Alice uses requires skilled people to develop, build, and deploy it.

But in an era with modern communication it doesn’t really require vast amounts of money. Some money, but not “half the wealth of the country is controlled by a handful of people” kind of wealth. In the sciences we have “open science”. It is an off shoot of the open source movement in software. Both of these open movements are allowing great technical innovation, without wealthy capitalists backing them.

I would argue the key element here is something called Intellectual Property. The ownership of ideas. Today, we allow people to own ideas for a length of time to allow them to profit off the effort it took them to develop the idea. We can copyright, patent, or trademark our ideas. But an often overlooked aspect of Traveller is that the Empire only controls interstellar trade. In the Traveller universe, the Empire controls the movement of intellectual property.

At almost any technology level people can communicate with others in their star system. But communication between stars happens at the speed of travel, or at the speed of trade. The most important thing the Empire provides are standards and protocols. The Empire regulates how technology interfaces with other technology. This allows the Empire to exist as a single culture even though there is massive heterogeneity within its people and their technology.

Mora can develop a cool new jump drive, but someone on Regina can install it on their ship. Because all the standards are set by the Empire. The Traveller mechanics already allow this, which implies that the Empire is regulating technology standards.

We are already primed for solarpunk Traveller. This setting is not anti-corporations instead it is anti-enshittification. No one can have a monopoly on a technology. Imperial standards allow local components to be added to off-world systems. If someone wants to sell Alice a harvesting robot, they can. But if she can access the right highly qualified personnel, she can modify it to meet her needs. And if her world has enough population and high enough tech level, she can likely find someone who can help her.

Mega corps are not all powerful. The things they make are commodities, not protected intellectual property. Instead, Traveller corporations are fragmented bodies, not dissimilar to (say) the Hudson Bay company before the invention of the telegraph. Traveller interstellar corporations that leverage the unique skills of their HQP and history to create products people want. But if they start enshitting their products to try and extract increased wealth at the expense of utility, people can simply walk away.

On Earth today there are a handful of corporate entities that control the intellectual property behind most of modern technology. In a Traveller setting, such a monopoly can not exist. If you start making your products worse, in order to gain a profit, someone else can make a replacement for the thing (using a different approach) and everyone will start buying that and everyone will start buying that and swap out your tech.

In fact, corporate reputation will likely be one of their most important assets. And the key resource being traded long distances is knowledge. Specifically, technical knowledge. There can be endless adventures focused on identifying and recruiting the HQP who have the technical knowledge needed to create a local solution.

In fact, Traveller technology is already be solarpunk, we don’t need to change the tech rules—just how we view them. Any set of tech rules where you can create a vehicle (or robot) by purchasing different components, at different tech levels, but which will interoperate, can be considered solarpunk.

Now we are in a place where we don’t need to change the rules, just our understanding of what the rules mean. Well, that is enough rambling for now. As always thanks for reading this and please feel free to leave your comments or questions below.

Solarpunk Traveller #3

 

Why people wont ship food between worlds (much).

Here are links to the earlier posts. Solarpunk Traveller #1 and #2

I’m writing this in Q2 of 2026 in the time between when the oil has stopped flowing from the Middle East but before the last cargo ship arrives in North America. We have been watching a crisis unfold slowly across the globe as locations which use Middle Eastern oil for energy start to feel the shortage. We don’t really know how that will effect the US and Canada yet, but we will start seeing the effects in about a week.

But it has made me think about shipping food.

A recurrent theme in the Traveller is buying and selling cargoes for your free trader starship. It is a notion modelled on the world of about the time my parents were born. Back then, in the 1920s and 30s, there were large cargo ships that were made for specific companies, that would travel on fixed routes, with fixed cargoes. One might pick up bananas in South America, move them to the US, then reload the ship with cars and move them to Europe, then take cargo from there back to South America. Then there were the free traders. These were smaller ships that would look for cargo in whatever port they happened to be in, take it to where it was going and start looking for more cargo there.

These free traders also usually had a few cabins and would take passengers with them. Allowing people to move about before the creation of regular air lines. Here is a neat book about travelling on these ships. That whole world died with the Second World War. By the 1970s, when Traveller was written, food transport was already beginning to be standardized. Containers dominated shipping. Cargo ship seldom picked up cargoes and instead things were moved in standard containers with corporate ships transferring containers as needed between ports and trains taking them inland. Free traders were already rare at that time.

By 2026 this containerized network covers the global and represents the overwhelming majority of all international movement of goods.

Including food. We grow fruits in one country, ship them halfway around the world to process them and then ship the processed food again for packaging. Shipping is so cheap that it is the price of labour that drives where certain work is done, moving the goods is almost free. At least as long as the oil is flowing.

But in Traveller, movement is expensive and time consuming (one week per jump) and energy is basically free. Traveller assumes that there are relatively low-tech ways to convert hydrogen gas into electricity—it’s the power plant for all those relatively inexpensive starships.

Google tells me that accelerating a 100 ton starship at 1G for 1 day would take on the order of 8 x 10^12 calories (already converted to kcal for my fellow math nerds) which is enough energy to feed half of Earth’s current population for one day. In other words, a 7 ton, 16 Mcr power plant could feed all the people on Earth today. Let’s assume 50% efficiency and go with two of them. The amount of money spent on food in the USA would pay for these two power plants in about six minutes.

So what is food? Food is mostly just reduced carbon. Plants take in carbon dioxide, which is literally just oxidized carbon and they “reduce” it – if you remember REDOX reactions from high school chemistry, that was what they were talking about – the plants then break water (H2O) and produce O2 gas (oxygen) and various hydrocarbons. We then eat the hydrocarbons – often as sugars and starch or lipids—and use the energy to run our bodies. Now there is some fancy chemistry that needs to be done, our bodies have certain small molecules that we need but can not produce ourselves, essential amino acids and the like, and there are a number of micro nutrients that we also need. But all of this is just a chemistry problem.

You can imagine LEDs being used to grow plants which are then feed to other creatures in carefully constructed networks that creates everything humans need to survive. In Andrew Weir’s 2017 book Artemis , we see a very near future moon colony that recycles wastes to run algae production to create food, using power from a nuclear power plant. And it is so new that people complain about the flavors, and rich people like to pay to have Earth food shipped to the base. But that is about the extent of it.

So any Traveller colony of non-trivial size, say half a million or more people, would have food production facilities that will meet all of their populations needs for a fraction of the cost of one one-hundred ton starship. We can assume there would be multiple systems producing a variety of foods. There is no real need to ship food from one world to another.

In fact, food production is really just a minor consideration for interstellar travel. Sure, there will be short-term bases that are created to do a thing, and they are too small or too temporary to justify setting up an ecology. These places would have regularly scheduled food shipments. Likewise, there will be communities that want specific food items only available on another world. These can be shipped as needed.

But in general, the creation of food is a solved problem long before the first interstellar starship heads off to establish a new colony.

This does bring up an interesting problem of technology. Some places are going to be hostile to life. They will need a “mechanical” or “technological” ecosystem. Food will be created from carbon dioxide which will create the required oxygen gas, which in turn is consumed by the humans to recreate carbon dioxide. Energy will be feed into this system and allowances will be made for certain inefficiencies—maybe they need to add outside water to account for trace amounts of escaped gas or maybe certain micronutrients are not recovered and everyone takes a pill once a month. These worlds need to maintain their technology level if they are to last. Life on such a world is dependent on the technology.

Other worlds may want to be self-sufficient without needing technology. They want self-replicating, living systems, to create what they need. How this is done depends on why people have settled the world. If your religion believes that you should settle this particular uninhabited world and there you and your decedents will live the “One True Life” (tm), then you either need to change the world to fit your needs or you need to change yourself to fit the world. And this opens infinite terraforming and biopunk story opportunities.

This is probably enough for today. As always thank you for reading this and I always welcome comments or questions below.

Solarpunk Traveller #2

It took me a while to figure out how to approach this, but I think I have it.

This is Part 2 of a series that starts here.

Why would people go into space? If you want to create a realistic solarpunk interpretation of the Traveller universe, you have to start by answering the question, “Why do people go into space?” This is the main problem holding back modern space exploration. No one can come up with a compelling reason to go. It is hard, technically challenging, and requires a comparatively large amount of resources.

But, it is pretty obvious that eventually people will start travelling through space. One obvious reason to go is to prove (to yourself and others) that you can. That’s how the USA put people on the moon.

A close follow up to that reason is to see what is there. Given that in the Traveller universe the only way to see what is actually going on at another star system is to go there, it seems likely that a lot of initial space exploration will be jumping to new systems just to map them, see if they have any unusual concentrations of resources, or if there is any alien life there.

This brings us to an oddity of the Traveller backstory. Once upon a time, 300,000 years ago, an alien species called the Ancients transported humans to all sorts of other worlds. No one knows why. But, this means that eventually our exploring humans will encounter other exploring humans and everyone’s view of life, the universe, and everything will be upended. Once we know there are other clusters of humans out there, many cultures are going to jump start their exploration just to see what they can find.

Next, people will go into space just to harvest resources. But there won’t be that many resources people actually need. At least, not resources that will need to be shipped back to another star system. Elements and minerals that are rare on the surface of Earth, gold, diamonds, are common if you look in the right spot. Since gold forms in the hearts of massive events like supernovae, once you find where it is locally abundant, you can get as much as you need. And you don’t really need that much. We like gold because it is non-fungible—meaning we can use it as a token to control commerce. There will be no element that can serve this role once you have access to all of space. And minerals like diamonds—aside from likely being very abundant in certain locations, they can be fabricated. Even today, diamonds are easily manufactured whenever they are needed.

An oily aside. Petrochemicals won’t exist the way we know them today. To get oil deposits, you need plate tectonics, which requires liquid water and oceans, and living systems lasting for hundreds of millions of years. The living systems reduce carbon from their environment, die, and get buried through tectonic action, before they can oxidize. There will be very few worlds where this will happen, and there will be no reason to ship the oil when they do. We like oil because it can be burned when needed to power cars and the like. But in Traveller, you already have all the power you need with fusion reactors. It is easier to build an electrical distribution system around your reactors than to ship a bunch of flammable liquids over interstellar distances.

It seems likely that there will be some short-distance transfer of raw resources. This planet finds it easier to get the mineral that they need from over there, rather than building factories to make it on their own world. But if the trade starts getting too hard, you just walk away from the problem.

Which brings me to what I think will be the main reason people will head off to other worlds. To get away from people.

People form communities and communities form cultures and cultures are always different from one another. I currently live in Manitoba and this is one of the last corners of Western civilization. There are just under two million of us here, with about half living within a half hour drive from where I am typing. (We have one main city, Winnipeg, and it has about half the province’s population.) In this province, we have dozens of different communities composed of people that want to only (or primarily) associate with their own people. Some of these communities are small enough and have been together long enough that they are starting to become inbred. I see no reason to suspect that this will ever change. The individual groups come and go, but I can easily imagine a far future where groups of people are transporting themselves off to uninhabited worlds and establishing themselves there, with the hope of living in isolation.

A biopunk aside; Genetic Isolation. I suspect that once the tech is available, a lot of these communities will also want to modify their biology to further this isolation. It is likely that it will be relatively easy to modify an organism’s chromosome structure so that members of a community can only produce viable children with other community members. This is a likely way that despotic leaders will try and keep their population under their control. At the same time, it is likely they will also want to modify people’s physical appearance so that you can easily recognize outsiders.

“But hey, this is biopunk not solarpunk. Where is the optimism?”

“Easy. It is in the rest of humanity.”

I live in Manitoba and I am surrounded by self-isolating communities. But I am also surrounded by people who have left them. The problem that the despots face is that as soon as people realize that these communities are based on a false understanding of the world, many of their people leave. I know countless ex-this and ex-thats.

So my vision of a solarpunk Traveller universe is one that is full of worlds that are marked as amber zones because the locals are trying to keep their people from learning the true nature of the universe while it is all glued together by people who have—for the most part—recently left this or that group and have discovered the broader nature of human existence.

Further, this will be so common that there will exist communities who’s main goal is liberating those who are trapped. Underground railroads transporting the repressed. Genetic clinics that reverse religious-based modification. Countless games can be focused on the adventure of people discovering life beyond that they are taught.

And that leads us to the one force that has the greatest impact on human mixing, conflict. But I think that is a topic for another post. Until then, I thank you for your time, and as always I invite any questions or comments below.

Why AI is not going to take your job.

 

TL;DR. Foundation Model AI have effectively reached their current limit and that isn’t good enough to replace most educated workers.

I have heard, both in person and on-line, CEOs of AI-based companies saying that their new technology is going to make most workers redundant. They claim we won’t need most skilled workers in the future. Exactly when? Really soon.

This is just a marketing lie. Everyone who understands the technology knows it is not true, but the goal is to feed the dreams of the super-rich and convince them to invest in AI technology. Anyone who understands the technology knows the claim isn’t true. My goal, with this post, is to help the average reader understand why this so, that is why AI is not going to replace skilled workers.

To get there we will have to talk about things that most people don’t currently know. They are a little bit complex, but not nearly as hard to understand as what the tech bros want you to think they are. But you will face a bunch of text without pretty pictures, and I’m afraid you’re going to have to suffer through, if you want to understand the changes happening around you.

The Basics

First we need to have some understanding of two terms that sound complex, but at their core are reasonably simple. They are Latent Space and a Universal Function Approximator. Most people don’t know these terms, but it will take you about three minutes to understand them well enough to know why skilled labor isn’t going anywhere, so I’m hoping you’ll stick with me.

Latent Space. A latent space is a compressed representation of something. The idea is that we can strip off a lot of details and get to the core of something in a simpler form. For example, imagine you correlated peoples ages and heights. Older people tend to be taller, at least during childhood. But once adult height is reached, we stay pretty much the same over our lives, until we shrink a little when we become elderly. I could develop a mathematical function, using fancy regression, that predicts the average person’s height, given their age. For kids, you could use a linear regression of a line going up with time. We can add some fancy bits to flatten the line at adulthood.

That function is a latent representation of the relationship between age and height. It will be pretty good, but not great, at predicting a persons height, if you give it their age.

I could add additional things to the equation that will make it better. I could add the person’s nutritional background, and maybe some genetic markers, and maybe their parent’s height when they were the same age. All of this would make my function do a better job of predicting a person’s height, but it would still not be perfect. But it would be a latent space for predicting a person’s height. Adding information about Mary Shelly’s book Frankenstein will not improve this equation—this become important later.

Universal Function Approximator. Deep learning using something call Artificial Neural Networks. These are fancy and complex mathematical tools that function as universal function approximators. Remember that function we wanted that would take a person’s age, nutritional background, parent’s heights and genetic markers, and predict a persons height? To find that function in the real world will take a massive amount of information and several hours of collaborative meetings between domain experts and biostatisticians. But we could use artificial neural networks to approximate that function. These tools can find something that is almost as good as if you had the experts do it. But not exactly as good.

Deep learning can approximate a complex latent space, provided it has enough training data relative to the problem. It uses some fancy logic to estimate the function, and the corresponding latent space, and the more data it has, the better the job it does. But it will never be as good as doing the analysis correctly from first principles. Though, it will often be good enough.

The Limits of Training Data

There are lots of fancy terms being kicked around to describe different ways to put together these artificial neural networks and create useful latent spaces. The biggest ones are now called Foundation Models and these are what the Tech Bros are trying to sell you.

Aside. Remember the Tech Bros are not really trying to sell the service to you. They are trying to convince people who have billions of dollars that their technology will replace the workers the billionaires have to pay in order to make more money. They just need you to believe what they are saying so the billionaires will believe them also.

So Foundation Models take massive training data sets and try to find a Latent Space that can predict anything. The “G” in chatGPT stands for Generalized. A GPT is a pretrained (that’s the “P”) generalized tool. You can ask it anything, and it will have an answer. It has be trained to have a latent space to predict anything. It can tell you how many “r”s are in Strawberry. How Frankenstein ends. And how tall a person is at age 3. We’ve trained this latent space to have every answer all at once.

The models aren’t really that good, but they are improving. The people I know use them to answer easy questions in areas they aren’t expert in. What is the code to write a t-test in the programming language R?

But most of us have noticed that the models are no longer improving very much. A few years ago you could believe a CEO when they told you that they were weeks away from having a GPT that did everything. Because every week they seemed to get better. But then they stopped.

 There is one figure that you need to see in order to understand why they stopped improving.

I added the purple line by hand—it is not a regression line, just my guess as to where such a line would go. But I think pretty much everyone can see the pattern.

This image is taken from https://epoch.ai/benchmarks/eci. What it shows is the relationship of Foundation Models between their performance—how well they work according to a certain set of metrics—and the size of their training data set. Well, actually the log of the size of their training data set. So the left most point which has a performance score a little below 70, was trained on a data set of a certain size. And it was a huge training set. And chatGPT5 up near the top right, with a score of almost double the left most point was trained on a data set 10,000 times larger!

Increasing the training set by 10,000 times only doubled performance. And worse, it appears to be slowing down. Models trained on even larger sets seem to have little or no improvement. We are close to the maximum that the current architecture can produce.

Building larger data centers and training models with even larger data sets is not going to make them particularly better. Only innovation in the AI architecture is going to do that, and the people working on AI are too busy trying to fleece the billionaires to spend any time on that. It is not that we couldn’t build better AI. It is simply not going to be worth it. The people who could build new architectures that generate better models from the same size training sets aren’t working on that problem. It is not an easy problem, and it certainly can’t be solved by a vibe-coding kid.

A Foundation Model’s performance (for a given architecture) depends on the size of its training set. Oh, there is some noise around it. This one is a little better than that one, but in general, they improve with exponentially more training data.

And they are out of training data. They have taken everything that is easily available.

Another Aside. In order to see real innovation in the AI industry, what you need to watch for is new AI architectures that gives improved performance with the same amount of training data. This would be represented as a curve above the one I drew. Such a curve will likely have a new slope and will represent a real improvement, not just marketing hype.

Conclusions

Remember that fancy regression we did at the start of this post? It will never be perfect, but it can be both close and useful. Provided you have enough experts working on it. Our AI approximation will always be a little worse (or a lot worse) than the bespoke model.

Foundation Models are trained from data stolen off the web. But Shakespeare is dead. He’s not writing any more. Same with Mary Shelly. So all the new data you can get is from the on-line content currently living people are creating. (This blog will likely be slurped into some models without my consent.)

But we don’t write our deepest expertise on-line. We write things that we want people who know less than us to understand. This blog is to help intelligent readers with little AI exposure understand the limitations of AI, not my thoughts on using visible AI to interpret omic data sets. Only my coworkers hear those. Eventually we will write new peer reviewed papers that the Tech Bros will steal to add to their models. But only AFTER we are using them. And such papers are always incomplete.

The current approach to AI will always lag.

This post is already getting long, so I’ll stop here, but there is a whole other story on AI performance related to the density of training data. Questions that fall near areas in the latent space that are relatively rich in training information will yield better results than those out and away from training data. Just like our regression example is trained on human age and height and will not work well for either mice or elephants, questions asked to Foundation Models do best when they are asked about things close to their training data.

Models asked about how to write R code for calculating a t-test do relatively well. There are hundreds of web sites that answer that question. If you ask the same question about hierarchical linear models (which have very little representation in the training data) the models do poorly and often give factually incorrect answers. And this isn’t going to change any time soon.

As always, thank you for read this and I always welcome your comments and questions below. Also, I am trying to make this approachable to a broad audience and always appreciate feedback on where I was unclear.

Solarpunk Traveller #1

 

I have a hard time considering running a Traveller game within the default setting because it is just so unrealistic. As I’ve already mentioned (in my four earlier Traveller posts, #1, #2, #3, and #4), the game is based on backwards-looking science and tries to recreate something like the British Empire in space. It’s fine if you are into that sort of thing, but I want something with more science fiction, less historical.

What do I want? What I am really trying to accomplish with these posts is to motivate someone to write a descent Traveller setting that I can then convince my Monday night gaming group to play, without me having to write it myself. If you are thinking of writing a forward-looking version of Traveller, please feel free to take any or all of what follows and incorporate it into your work. I want to play this game, not write it.

What is solarpunk? Like all fiction genera, solarpunk is ill-defined and means different things to different people, but it tends to cluster around a few core elements. I consider them to be:

Refusing pessimism: Solarpunk is not about accepting that all human existence must be miserable and dark. Instead, people can create societies that are functional and fair. Further, we can create technology that works for the benefit of people.

Sustainable technology: Solarpunk says that humans can create technologies that allow people to have a good life within these functional and fair societies. A lot of solarpunk focuses on renewable energy, but here we are talking about Traveller which assumes cheap and clean fusion power is easily available, so this is less of an issue.

Social equity: In order to have these fair and functional societies, we need to recognize the role of social equity. In my mind, this includes recognizing the inherent worth and dignity of all people. And we also have to recognize that wealth accumulation is a function of the rules of a society, and these are written by the collective will of the people.

The second issue with social equity is that we must recognize the fallacy of biological determinism (which I have posted about here). This becomes an even bigger issue when we realize that at relatively low Traveller Technology Levels people will be able to modifier the genetics of their progeny. So, for example, in my game Rubble and Ruin their are bad people who have intentionally created races of big, low-intelligence humans. Solarpunk Traveller is going to have to address this application of technology.

Do-it-yourself: Lastly is the idea that the ability to create and modify technology does not have to be controlled by oligarchs. Much of the idea that modern technology cannot be modified or repaired is created by corporate entities trying to force people to buy a new device rather than repair an old one.

This becomes critically important when you think about interstellar trade in a Traveller-like universe. In a Traveller universe, there are nearly infinite markets. You do not need to intentionally make a bad product to drive sales. In fact, if you want to sell something off-world, you need to have a reputation for being reliable and repairable.

I argue that DIY in the Traveller universe is the presence of transparency and technological standards. Transparency means that you have to say what things really are. No withholding important information. What is the thing made out of? What are the operating conditions under which it is intended to work? How is it designed and how does it work? And standards imply that others can build things that work with what you have built. If you make an electronic devise, I need to be able to know exactly what power supply it needs. We already do this on Earth. There is just a handful of electronic plugs and voltages that are supplied, and you need to make sure your electronic equipment conforms to those standards.

But more than that in Traveller. All your information technology needs to interoperate. Imagine not being ably to repair a starship because the navigation computer was made on Mora, and they use a different jump drive interface and the computer and the drive cannot function together. Now consider this for every two pieces of equipment that are supposed to work together. Imagine missiles fired from a starship that accidentally swing back and attack the firing ship because the targeting system uses the wrong measuring scale.

The most important thing that the Empire does is to keep the technology from one world able to operate on another. Any reader with a technology development background is likely say, “Of course, that is a massive and wildly important task”, while other readers are likely shaking their head and saying, “How trivial and boring.” In a sense, they are both correct. But most real conflict in a Third Imperium type world will come from conflicts over standards rather than over resources.

===== Getting Started =====

The Ground Rules. What am I keeping from the Third Imperium and what am I letting go?

The Map? Let’s start with the map. It is a silly, 2D hex-based map. I love it. When 2300 came out, everyone I knew loved the realistic 3D star map. Someone had already done the work of finding routes away from Earth that matched the space travel technology postulated by the game. It was great. But at the end of the day, for me, it neither enhanced play or immersion. I accept that some people will want a nice, modern 3D map, but I’m willing to not worry about it.

The Future History? What about the background? I’d like to keep the major events. The Ancients seeded many worlds 300,000 years ago. These scattered worlds have become the home to humans who have spread out across the nearby space. There are other alien races who have also developed space travel, and they are different from humans. That’s all works for me.

The Core Technology? Let’s keep it. Let’s keep the restriction that jump drives take a week to travel, independent of the distance they go. This is a great mechanic and it leads to an interesting situation where travel between human communities is once again long and dangerous. Let’s also keep the important fact that there is no faster way to communicate between worlds than to travel there.

Psionics? I vote no. I was there in the 1970s. Many, many people truly believed that psionics were a real thing and they were just about to become understood. This was a traditional that traced back to the dawn of science fiction. People honestly believed that magic was a real thing that we just didn’t yet understand—but it was coming soon. This hasn’t aged well and I think we can let them go. (As an aside, you find psi powers in all hard sci fi games of that time, Morrow Project, Aftermath, all of them.)

But we are going to need to add a modern understanding of biotechnology. And we will need to modernize the information technology. But those are separate issues.

For now, I think I am going to stop this here. I have a start. The next post will start with what I think a solarpunk Third Emporium will look like—or at least, what issues we need to consider. In till then, as always thank you for taking the time to read this and I always welcome comments, questions, or concerns in the comments below.