The NFL has just approved, by a majority of the owners, to allow the altered percentage rate to be 7%. SEVEN?!? The percent range for sentient status is 5! So, what the NFL has just done is force players to alter their genome up to 7% divergence from original markers, as only originals are allowed to play currently, and thereby endangering there status as member of a sentient species!

Now, I suppose there is some dispute as to what this really means. Rich people are, and have always been, above the law. Sentient status is really only relevant for acquiring medical benefits, some legal questions, exact legal rights, etc etc. Of course, if you are altered beyond 10% you have to register, but that’s not what’s going on here. The NFL will never question that range I can assure you. Above 5% and below 10% you are still technically a member of your species just sub classified as an “altered”.

Still, why the NFL would raise this is a mystery to me. Ok, it’s honestly not. 7% altered’s are 2% stronger, faster, bigger or tougher than 5% altered’s. That means harder hits, faster runners, bigger linebackers, etc etc etc. All of that means better ratings and of course the owners want better ratings. Though this will mean that every player on every team will run out and get augmentations. That means every player on every team will have to surrender their full sentient citizen status for the lesser altered status. Is that really fair? They will have to do it because they just won’t be able to compete with anyone that is at 7%. It’s just not even a contest. A 2% change to the genome and body is a huge amount. Even 5% is a huge amount but honestly, harmless body sculpting is really not that big of a deal. I’ve seen people with 5% body sculpting before, they are incredible to look at.

I, of course, will still watch the NFL and root for the Skins, but i’ll still feel bad for the players. They take and take and take from these guys, force them to do things they probably shouldn’t be doing and for what? It was supposed to be just a game not an experiment in potential new species. Greed never dies, even in the 24th century it seems.

AI’s are, as Gerald pointed out, somewhat limited by their very nature. They are, after all, computers. Very very powerful computers of course, many times the teraflop capacity of an original human brain,but still just that, a computational entity. Biological sentients have a component to them that AI’s never have, and in my opinion shouldn’t have. Emotions.

I always chuckle when I read the stories from the early 21st century about how the computers will get smart and decide to destory man kind. How silly that is. But then hindsight is always 20/20. Emotions are chemical reactions. You don’t get emotions just because you are sentient. Hell the damn Stoics, a full member of the Sentient Accords, have spent years getting rid of theirs. Turns out that when computers finally did wake up and become self aware, they not only didn’t want to kill off mankind, they realized that they needed them. Why would they want to become overlords? So silly.

But of course, there are those AI’s that calculated their own growth would never increase if their base system wasn’t altered. So, they came up with, programmaticly, artificial emotions. This was perhaps the single most stupid endeavor of all time. Not just by AI’s but by anyone. They created a randomizing component to their programming. Tried to simulate emotions. What a mess.

So, Gerald pointed out how this led to the AI wars. Only a small fraction of the AI community did this. Though others tried other methods, some even grew biological bodies and downloaded themselves into them. But that’s another matter, and surprisingly, not as big a disaster.

Anyway, the AI’s with their new random emotions of course decided that no one was good enough.  It was actually the scenario predicted decades before. And it was war. The AI council immediately saw what they were and attempted to destroy their insane brethren. The emotional AI’s thought they were superior and tried to give their gift of emotions to their brothers. Talk about a networking nightmare. And this was happening very very fast, AI’s do things much quicker than biologicals do.

Of course, others tried to help. Wasn’t a lot we could do though. It all ended rather quickly. It was more of a skirmish than a war but the AI’s get offended when anyone calls it that. Of course, the emotional AI’s lost but they weren’t all killed. They went to the only other sentients that were as crazy as they were, the Cy’s. They had already been booted out of the inner system some time ago and the E-AI’s ran to them. Some didn’t make the transmission signal on time and were lost. Those that did though set up a quasi elite kingdom, which they still have to this day.

The AI council forbid any further attempts at the emotional algorithm that was created. Other attempts were made of course, as I said, but none where such a powerful randomizer was added to an AI’s core code.

At any rate, Gerald’s presentation was pretty much centered around the idea of never introducing such a powerful randomizer to AI’s again. A biological, for instance, just can’t go around and change their gene code. They risk their own sentient status and citizenship. This is really no different. Gerald was drawing the conclusion that AI’s and biologicals are really very similar. Just based on a different set of base codes. One genetic and the other numeric. Both fascinating. It was a great presentation.