Detroit: Become Human

Talk about depictions of the future in science fiction and other sources
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funkervogt
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Re: Detroit: Become Human

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I played a little more. As the female android maid, I, uh, let the degenerate father beat his young daughter to death.

This makes me wonder what the rules will be when we actually have androids. Will they be required to intervene to prevent crimes happening in front of them? If so, what kinds of crimes?

Will we merely require them to report crimes they see to the police after the fact? Again, what level of crime must be reported? Smoking marijuana in your own house?

The lowest level of mandate would be for androids to save recordings of their experiences. The police could get a warrant to see the footage if they suspected an android saw a crime, just as they can confiscate footage from a surveillance camera.

Of course, all of this raises major privacy issues for android owners and any other human who comes near an android. I have no clue how it will be resolved.
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wjfox
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Re: Detroit: Become Human

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funkervogt
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Re: Detroit: Become Human

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I just played the disturbing but masterfully done episode where you wake up in a junkyard as a damaged android and have to fix yourself and get out. Here's the full clip:



The hellish junkyard is full of dead and dying androids and their body parts, and you must find replacement components among them to fix yourself. Therein lies the flaw of the scenario: Instead of tossing the old androids into a big pit to rust, why don't the junkyard owners "employ" two or three android workers to analyze each trashed android as it arrives, and remove the valuable parts for resale? Wouldn't that make the junkyard owners more money? Keep in mind the worker androids will do this for free, and would only need to have their batteries recharged every day. That's a trivial expense.

Whenever the need arises for something like an "android junkyard," I think they will actually be large buildings like this, where the old androids arrive in through a door on one end, go down a conveyor belt where they are slowly disassembled, and then delivery trucks full of boxed parts drive out a big door at the other end. Anything that couldn't be resold would be sent to the metal recycler. There would not be ghastly places full of groaning, crawling robo-corpses.

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Re: Detroit: Become Human

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I just played the episode where you are the wrongly accused fugitive android, and you have to find and enter the android safe haven on the docked ship. This requires you to physically overcome several obstacles, like jumping over big holes to get to the other side, and swinging across dilapidated catwalks and fire escapes.

I liked how your android was able to visually plan out his movements by running virtual simulations of himself running and jumping through different possible routes around the obstacles. The ones that would lead to failure, like falling down the big hole, were revealed. In the future, intelligent machines will have these kinds of predictive algorithms and will move very nimbly and purposefully as a result. They won't have to waste time with trial-and-error movements like us humans since they'll be able to do it in their heads at very fast speeds before they start moving at all.

Also, I noticed a funny mistake in the game. A newspaper headline reads: "Cyberlife world's first trillion dollar company" ("Cyberlife" is the fictional company that makes androids). The game is set in November 2038, but the first company to reach a trillion dollar market capitalization did so on August 2, 2018, and it was Apple. The game Detroit: Become Human was released on May 25, 2018, so one of their predictions was wrong within a few months.
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Re: Detroit: Become Human

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You've highlighted a few plotholes, and I'm sure there are many more throughout the story. But I can forgive the game developers for using artistic license to create some very memorable and thought-provoking scenes, like the junkyard you mentioned. It's still one of my all-time favourite games and is among the most realistic portrayals I've seen of near-future androids in human society. I also loved the chemistry between Hank and Connor.

Agreed about the predictive algorithms, which they'll use to simulate routes and overcome obstacles, etc. Actually, I remember this idea being mentioned some years earlier on JR Mooneyham's timeline of the future. It's one of the main ways that robots (and maybe transhumans) will be vastly more capable, faster, and potentially a lot more dangerous than humans. I plan to include it somewhere on our mid-late 21st century pages, when I do an update for those.

Please keep posting your updates on here, as I'm curious to know which ending you reach! My first playthrough was a peaceful ending. Can't quite remember the second one, but I think it was a good outcome too.
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Re: Detroit: Become Human

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wjfox wrote: Wed May 17, 2023 10:32 am You've highlighted a few plotholes, and I'm sure there are many more throughout the story. But I can forgive the game developers for using artistic license to create some very memorable and thought-provoking scenes, like the junkyard you mentioned. It's still one of my all-time favourite games and is among the most realistic portrayals I've seen of near-future androids in human society. I also loved the chemistry between Hank and Connor.

Agreed about the predictive algorithms, which they'll use to simulate routes and overcome obstacles, etc. Actually, I remember this idea being mentioned some years earlier on JR Mooneyham's timeline of the future. It's one of the main ways that robots (and maybe transhumans) will be vastly more capable, faster, and potentially a lot more dangerous than humans. I plan to include it somewhere on our mid-late 21st century pages, when I do an update for those.

Please keep posting your updates on here, as I'm curious to know which ending you reach! My first playthrough was a peaceful ending. Can't quite remember the second one, but I think it was a good outcome too.
To be clear, I'm enjoying the "game" and think it's very well done. When I point out flaws in works of future fiction, it's not to denigrate them, but to instead come closer to a clearer understanding of what the future will really be like.

For example, the android junkyard episode led me to realize it was unrealistic since, if the junkyard is getting fully functional androids for free, it would be easy for the owner to task a few of them early on with disassembling the incoming androids and reselling their components. But why stop there? Shouldn't regular junkyards that receive all types of waste ALSO have androids to sort through the waste to remove anything valuable? As a result, the landfills would get smaller and the amount of waste in the economy would shrink.

But why stop there? If every household has an android that can work all day, why not task it with sorting through the trash produced by its owners and reselling the valuable things on eBay? If the household had a backyard, it could also compost their organic waste, which would benefit their yard or which could be sold to other people. The remaining waste would be less voluminous, and could be stored at the property until there was enough of it to justify calling a dump truck to haul it away. As a result, the whole waste disposal system would become "smart" instead of "dumb": Instead of you paying a flat, yearly fee for municipal waste removal, and having a dump truck stop in front of your house once a week regardless of how much or how little waste you had, you'd only pay for each individual visit. Your android would keep track of how much trash had accumulated on your property, and would call the dump truck to come once it reached a certain level.

So androids would empower average people in this regard. Valuable stuff wouldn't enter the trash stream in the first place, and wouldn't make it to junkyards in the first place to get picked out by the androids that were working there. Thanks to robot labor, the economy would become more circular and less wasteful, with fewer middlemen in the secondhand items trade.
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Re: Detroit: Become Human

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I just played the episode where you explore the android ship and see the pitiful state of their existence.

1) Amongst themselves, androids wouldn't speak in ways humans could understand. At the very least, they'd speak human languages, but very quickly to convey information as fast as possible. They'd sound kind of like the cartoon chipmunks as a result. However, they would probably speak using something like the staticky dial-up modem sounds you'd hear if you picked up the phone when a modem was active. I've read that's the most efficient way to transfer digital information using sounds.

2) The fact that the androids on the ship were slowly dying didn't make sense. They could go into something like hibernation mode if they were low on energy. Like Xeno's Paradox, they could slow their functions in a manner proportional to the sizes of their remaining power reserves. And why couldn't they just shut themselves down with the understanding that other androids in better shape would reactivate them once they found more fuel?

When you shut your PC off, it doesn't "die." Why should it be different for AIs? Wouldn't the period when they were shutdown be the same as a night of dreamless sleep for one of us?

And once again, I don't think we'll ever be this cruel to androids. Even if some of us abused them, there would be an equal number who would go out of their way to help and rescue androids. There might be something like an Underground Railroad that fugitive androids could contact and join. The lack of this in the game is a major oversight.
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Re: Detroit: Become Human

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I played the short episode where the android detective meets the sinister black lady in the nice garden for the second time. When discussing the rising number of androids that are disobeying and even killing humans (in self-defense), she says they won't be able to keep the phenomenon secret for much longer.

This makes no sense. Considering how primed humans are for a robot uprising, and how easy it is for anyone to upload a video that goes viral, the very first instance of an android going rogue will be known to the public within days and will be huge news. The same will be the case for every rogue android thereafter.

If the androids have some proof their masters were abusing them or planning to destroy them, they'd get substantial public support. This game's depiction of the future and of human behavior is inaccurate.
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Re: Detroit: Become Human

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I just played the episode where you investigate the murder in the android brothel. In spite of 15 years of price inflation between then and today, sex with an android only costs $1 per minute, which actually makes sense since they will work for free. Androids will make unlimited amounts of high-quality sex with beautiful partners available to everyone for the first time in human history.

(This makes me wonder if there will be dog and cat sexbots that humans will rent or buy for the sake of their beloved pets.)

Also, I disagree with the game's depiction that androids will permanently die when they run out of fuel. They'll just switch off and will be capable of being revived later once someone puts new fuel in them. Killing one will require destroying their CPUs.
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Re: Detroit: Become Human

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I played the episode where the emotionally volatile human detective puts a gun to the forehead of his android partner and threatens to shoot. In reality, an android designed to be a police officer would have bullet proof materials integrated into its body, so the gun would have posed no threat to its life. Even if the handgun were a .44 Magnum, it would have bounced off an android skull made of a mere 1/4" thick of high-quality steel. At such close range, the real danger would have been to the human shooter since the bullet or fragments of it could have bounced off and hit him instead.

This makes me realize that, if we ever have a war with robots, handguns will be useless since any robot the size of a dog or larger will be armored enough to block the bullet. Robots that could be destroyed by handgun bullets will be so small and fast (like quadcopter suicide drones) that they will be impossible to hit with handguns anyway.
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