Societal reaction to robot-based immortality.

One of my characters is killed and then transferred into a gynoid. Her father was the founder of the company that creates essentially all of the robotics in this world,and the method of transferring consciousness is being kept a secret from the public.

How would the law react to an android claiming to be the resurrected heiress to this company?

And the public?

And, well, anything else you guys can thing of. I have great faith that this community will give me some wonderful things to go off on.

Um... it would be, assuming it's the first case, an absurdly complex legal case. I'm not even sure she could win...

... That bitch would either be laughed away, or fucking stoned. Let's just say that even if they believed her, many, many people would share the same reaction Salem had to a group of young women a couple centuries back and immediately attempt to execute "the abomination".

Whether or not they succeed is another thing entirely, but you get my point. Even without taking legal issues into account, the uproar caused by the quote unquote "moral implications" would be staggering, not to mention all the research, human testing, and attempts to inevitably market (and the chaos involved with all that to boot).

edited 11th Jan '12 9:17:51 PM by KSPAM

Yeah, I kind of figured that much out. Pretty much anything in fiction is illegal if you think about it too much.

I tried to fix it by having her father give the robot itself the company, regardless of the person inside. Though I don't know how good that sounds.

The company also happens to be the largest producer of military equipment. Do with that information what you will.

edited 11th Jan '12 9:21:41 PM by GlassPistol

Yes, but the motives of the people win out over the law more often than not, so expect their to still be major issues, even in the legal department. The best bet for her would be to just get a new face and keep it all under wraps.

A weapons manufacturer now too? Oh that's lovely. Why not have her eat a cow alive on national television, piss off the vegans too? Seriously, everyone is going to be up in this girl's shit, political and religious differences be damned.

edited 11th Jan '12 9:24:27 PM by KSPAM

I'm actually writing a paper for a class based on a similar subject: what happens to society when we cure old age? My ultimate conclusion is that the only viable way to control the resulting population explosion is an endless war for resources that limits population growth.

Actually it's not that kind of immortality. More of the, young until death sort than the never dying part. All of my androids have a 100 year lifespan limit.

If corporations are people I don't see why robots can't be. @_@

Yes, but when that's up, they just transfer again. The problem remains.

Kind of the reason they aren't releasing the method.

Why not? The profit to be gained from such a venture would more than likely blind most of the very real possibility of intense overpopulation. It would make no sense from a business standpoint not to release it.

At the rate of technological advances, I'd be surprised that they should be meant to last as long as 100 years. From a profit standpoint they really should be built to last just long enough that the new type comes out so people will buy it.

edited 11th Jan '12 9:55:45 PM by NoirGrimoir

It really pisses me off when people assume that an end to aging will obviously immediately lead to skyrocketing overpopulation. Natural death already can't keep up with natural birth rates; if it could, then humanity wouldn't be viable as a species. In the absence of artificial birth control methods, birth rates will always overcome death rates; with their availability, birth rates are essentially a societal decision, and can be whatever you want them to be. If you removing death by aging, what will happen is the same thing that would happen if it remained, except if it's an overpopulation state then it's maybe a few generations sooner. If there's going to be war over resources, then there will be war over resources. If people hold their birth rates down to territory expansion, then there won't. The presence or absence of death through aging doesn't signify.

I don't know about that. Think about all the people who live and die each day. Every 24 hours, approximately 250,000 to 300,000 humans expire. In this same time, a roughly equal number of humans are born. Even discounting those who don't die of natural causes like age or disease, that is still (and I'm talking science now) a fuckton of people that get re-introduced into the system each day, in addition to the total number born.

It's not a sudden explosion of apocalyptic overpopulation, but the brakes would definitely be off on this crazy train.

edited 11th Jan '12 10:31:51 PM by KSPAM

Sure, the coefficients on your exponential curve go up a little, but it's still an exponential curve. If you're heading for an overpopulation state once aging goes away, that means you were still going to overpopulate with aging untouched; it would just be later.

Without access to artificial birth control, when not in a state of survival pressure due to lack of basic resources, birthrates are going to be around at least four or five per woman over her lifetime (on average). Replacement is about two. (Four or five is probably a low guess, really; in periods of fast population growth, which is pretty much defined by 'plentiful resources and no birth control', rates were more like eight or nine.) Sure it boosts the rate a lot not to have people dying, but it's not going to make the difference between 'sustainable state' and 'massive overpopulation'. If you're holding a sustainable state, you're already manipulating birthrates down to about half what they would be naturally; manipulating them down to replacement of accidental or violent death isn't much harder. If you don't have a sustainable state (which we don't, right now) then aging or no aging is irrelevant to whether it will eventually explode.

Well if that's what you meant by that, I agree. There's no questioning that as we are now, we're heading down a path to eventual overpopulation. All I was trying to say is what you were, a lack of aging would simply accelerate the process.

How does the end of the world sound to you? Sounds good to me!

The moral and social implications of such a thing would at the very least wreck the existing order of society, regardless of the legal outcome of such a case. From there it's not a long step to wars and the breakdown of society, at least temporarily.

edited 12th Jan '12 4:59:54 AM by Night