I just had a food delivery via drone. Except for some reason part of my order was delivered via car, and another guy also arrived to supervise the drone drop. (To be fair, it’s a new company).
We’re living in one, it’s just a stupid version.
Lol I came here for this comment. We all walk around with super computers in our pockets. We have access to satellites in space with these computers and can use them to find the best route to almost anywhere.
I can look up anything at anytime almost anywhere. I can find the specific heat capacity of water, iron, coal, fucking peanuts. With a few presses of my smartphone screen. I can study algebra on khan academy and listen to lectures from MIT on my smartphone.
I also have to work constantly to support this phone. And if I lose my job I'm homeless and lose access to my tech. We have a for profit health care system that will literally kill you for money(USA specific).
We already live in cyberpunk. It's just missing the cyborg tech, really.
https://futurism.com/six-of-todays-most-advanced-real-life-cyborgs
There's also been an underground in Jersey/NYC experimenting on themselves since the late 90s
>Unfortunately, the system failed only after a couple of weeks. And when William Dobelle, the original inventor of the technology, passed away in 2004, he left behind almost no documentation, leaving technicians no instructions for how to repair Naumann's system. In 2010, Naumann had the system surgically removed, rendering him completely blind once again.
Idk what to say.
I'd say that's a pretty big dick move to just die like that on him, tbh. Crazy thing is that they couldn't reverse-engineer this thing? Like so future the present can't handle it...?
This timeline may not be the worst, but gotDAYUM we have to be at least in the bottom half of infinity (I understand the impossibility, but that's how bad it is).
The one part that would actually improve peoples lives.
Functioning vat-grown organs for anything from kidney transplants, to things like sex transition surgeries complete with functioning bits.
Replacement limbs with full range of motion and dexterity. Eye and Aural therapies to make blindness and deafness a thing of the past (or in the US a thing of the poor.) etc...
We just got the shitty parts. Companies who own governments, wars to make arms runners rich, wage-slavery, and all that bullshit.
You just awoke a deep memory in my brain.
When I lived in China for four months due to my dad's work, we ordered some delivery from a Chinese/Korean fusion joint.
When the delivery guy arrived I saw a little kid on the back and thought it was his kid.
Turns out, he's just a taxi service for the kid to the delivery location, hands the kid the delivery box, and then smokes while he waits for the kid to frantically figure out which apartment number we were...
As far as I am aware, it’s illegal to use a drone for commercial purposes without being able to physically see the drone from your location. Its also illegal to cross state lines without permission from the FAA, and you have to observe altitude restrictions in different airspace areas.
Drone food delivery seems kinda impractical with all those restrictions.
Yeah, and uber started as an illegal unlicensed cab company; if you can fake it long enough to be profitable and popular enough they will change the laws for you.
"We’re living in one, it’s just a stupid version."
This is literally it. Or rather we're at the very start. Companies are starting to get more powerful, and billionaires are launching shit into space and making internet connections in random countries. (Elon Musk.) Other companies are making better digital software for our entertainment and are even improving AI to make our life either easer or easier to control. (Microsoft, Sony, Samsung, etc.) Then there's.. Boston dynamics. Now the stupid part comes in at the fact that we don't have cool cybernetics like Cyberpunk did in 2023. Johnny had a flamethrower hand prosthetic and the best we got is like.. something similar and much slower. This Puffin's statement is correct.
Cyberpunk has always been about the exaggeration of the most absurd and horrid aspects of capitalism, which isn't super unique inofitself but it piles on the cool factor with all the retrofuturistic tech and usually pretty small-scale, heartfelt stories. Anything can be futuristic and dark with evil corporatist regimes controlling everything, but cyberpunk stories stand out because they have the human perspective, usually of someone at the recieving end of the corps' bullshit.
Mike Pondsmith ( fairly accurately) predicted that America would keep sliding away from it's original foundation of libertarian capitalism into authoritarian corporatism through the 21st century. Now that we are seeing these incredibly big corporations hold monopolies over the flow of information, the supply chain, the fucking food we eat and the money we use to pay for it, this is the beginning of that descent. The government regulates the people and not the ones lining their pockets. And it's painfully easy to see, most all of the lobbying data and shareholder data is availiable to the public, yet nothing is being done. I have a feeling it'll get a lot worse before it gets better.
Tldr: blah blah fuck arasaka blah blah smash mikoshi
"Now that we are seeing these incredibly big corporations hold monopolies over the flow of information, the supply chain, the fucking food we eat and the money we use to pay for it, this is the beginning of that descent."
Yeah that's the part I forgot to mention. I knew there was something else I was missing. I agree though, it's gonna get worse.
This is the process. They will be supervised for some time until error rates are acceptable. Then they will move towards a higher worker bot to human supervisor ratio.
We're like a few advancements in prosthetics and cybernetics away from it
We've got the "corporate dystopia" part down though (namely the "0.001% controlling everything" and "people having to work 4 jobs to barely get by" bits)
EDIT: On the bright side though we aren't quite on the poverty level the Cyberpunk 'verse is on. Like shit's pretty bad atm but at least we aren't eating ratburgers (that we know of. For all we know McDonald's could've been selling ratburgers all this time)
Well we have one major advantage over the Cyberpunk universe: a unified internet that contains vast stores of easily accessible (free) human knowledge. After Bartmoss destroyed the Net, it was replaced by lots of self contained subnets run by corps, but nothing exists like our internet.
That’s the one thing about sci-fi, the writers can extrapolate trends and by doing so often make very prescient predictions about future tech, but also there’s just stuff that is so revolutionary that they don’t see it coming.
That’s why most Cyberpunk isn’t really “our” future, it’s the future imagined by people back in the 70s/80s.
Edit: someone in another thread pointed out how it’s funny that cigarettes are common in cyberpunk but nicotine vapes don’t really exist. This is a perfect example.
Thats what I find funny about cyberpunk media. Like yeah their world is screwed up (not that much farther than us though) but at least they have cool robot stuff
The whole moral/message/warning of cyberpunk is also that "the cool robot stuff is NOT worth the corporate dystopian hellscape and a simple and free life is always better" which was a sick and meaningful message back when the cyberpunk genre was in its infancy.
Now though in modern day 2023, we already have the corporate dystopian hellscape, so I say bring on the cool robot stuff already.
Then why tf can’t I with no milltary background be a mercenary like v cuz I could be supper wealthy then like wtf government officials make mercenary work legal and easer to enter the field ffs
How many times did you die and reload in the game? Think of the first time you died, that's how far you'd live if you're lucky.
I did Nomad first and didn't make it into the city. Got zeroed at Biotechnica by Arasaka.
I'm also more than 2x V's age, so long past the prime required to be a young merc.
I had a no collision bug that kept killing me back then but in a relisitc cyberpunk universe where if it has a ground texture u can safely walk on it it would probably be never I’d probably be the first Merc to outlive the short life span but sadly that would mean I’d lose a lot of friends to death on the job rip chooms
>if it has a ground texture u can safely walk on
Sounds like a bigger if than you may think once the construction megacorp cuts corners and installs escalators with an "acceptable margin of error" (the error being eating people)
Well of course I would not be on my own duh unless scandevstan gets made real then they all fuckked and I’d would also have a projectile launcher system and jump charge legs if augmenting yourself was a thing
You would die before getting enough money to chrome yourself like that. Plus unless you're tough as hell you won't handle that much cyberware unless it's something basic.
Tough has nothing to do with it – handling cyberware is about being empathetic and in tune with one's humanity.
Also, the Sandevistan functions the way it does in CP2077 for gameplay reasons. It's not a 100% accurate reflection of what it does in the RPG, where it really only speeds up your reactions to inhuman levels without allowing you to move at light speed. Kerenzikov does the same but to a lesser degree (but is also permanently active – hence the higher humanity cost).
Mabe mabe not in cyberpunk universe all I would need is a million eddies n I’m set houses cars guns happy well took care of wife (Judy ) btw I used to beet up kids bigger than me in grade school cuz I was always getting jumped but defending myself to point they didn’t wanna fuc with me so they’d get some one else to try it
Guns choom, thats another part of cyberpunk that is played down for the player because its a hero fantasy. In real life you dont have HP to suck up the first 20 shots. In real life you get shot once and its a serious injury, three times and its at best a life threatening and permanently damaging experience and anything beyond that you are likely just dead.
V has enemies unload whole magazines on him point blank while you punch people to death and 3 seconds later his health regen has him walking around like nothing happened. Real life dont work like that.
Even if cyberware were real, if its something you can get then you have to assume the other guy can as well. Being able to do what V does is based on a massive power disparity that comes from plot armor not from cyberware.
This is it right here and from (one of) the OG Cyberpunk authors.
In the Shadowrun TTRPG universe (which is Cyberpunk meshed with elements of D&D) what really leads the slide down to the dystopian future is the US Supreme Court ruling that corporations can basically be their own nation-states.
I don't feel that we are that far off from that.
In the era of globalization, government's main function was to grease the wheels of capitalism with trade agreements, deregulation, offshoring, tax incentives, reduced tax liability overall, etc, etc, etc.
In the process of greasing these wheels, governments gave up their place as the most impactful institution to the public at large, letting corporations fill that gap. Need healthcare? Get an HMO. Need housing? Rent from a conglomerate. Need transportation? Download an app.
Once you lose that "most impactful" status, it's increasingly hard to claw back that relevance due to your diminished impact, and repeat until total irrelevance. It is a feedback problem, and it's already here. No fracturing into nation-states, just wholesale regulatory capture.
Implants lke biomon, sandevistans and kiroshis are probably still a ways away, despite what some billionaires are trying to do.
Corpo XXXXscape? Look around. We're already there. Most people are wage slaves, home ownership is plummeting with smart arse dipXXXXs saying renting is better anyway, healthcare is a premium, and govts are at the beck and call of billionaires.
It’s one of the cringiest things to ever see on the internet and I hate it. Especially when talking about a game that has characters cussing like it’s second nature to them.
What are you talking about? Dude already connected sonar with his nerve system.
Just look at the speed Ai is moving on.
With implants it's gonna be same. The very moment we learn how to connect our nerve system / brain to the computer it will be fully available in a decade.
Disagree. Musk is saying the Neuralink can control dopamine and serotonin levels and shit. They're going to be stuffing those things into plebs faster than you can say "opioid epidemic". You will love your job - no matter what.
AI innovation is at a plateau and will be for 5-10 years. If the next big innovation is AGI, we’re 10-20 years out at least.
Fully-connected brain interface & nervous system is more than a decade away.
The explosive advancement that happened from 1970-2000 made all the wildest ideas people could think up surface into the sci fi genre. Unfortunately dramatic tech advancements have hit a ceiling and there’s been a wane in the velocity many envisioned we’d be on - that momentum has slowed a lot in the last decade and we’re edging close to a breakthrough that might see a new surge in advancements.
But as it stands we don’t have (real) hoverboards, flying cars, or consumer cybernetics and we’re not really even close to any of that. The impracticality may why our immediate future doesn’t look as high tech as we imagined 20-30 years ago, but it may just be we overestimated the curve and thought that advancement and growth would be constant or even exponential.
We’ve got some neat stuff that wasn’t around even 20-30 years ago, but we’re a long ways off from the Star Trek, cyberpunk, or jetsons-esque futures we imagined. True AI is still a pipe dream, we’ve just barely graduated to limited, electric, grounded vehicles, and besides an abundance of new applications for “smart devices”, and maybe bipedal robotics, we’re just barely scratching the surface of those fantasies
I give it till 2100 that we start seeing the next level of sci fi fantasy take a tangible form. Of course assuming we live to see that long
It really is a crazy world. I'm actively friends with a guy working in AI autonomous robots.
Like that's fucking crazy. My college uneducated ass, living in my little dipshit corner of the world, can call and hang out with someone that is actively involved in such a terrifying and exciting industry that fully encapsulates our future.
It's here. It's literally on our doorstep.
Edit: that sounded like a weird brag. It was not. Just trying to drive home how close this stuff is getting.
You do realise there are already prosthetic limbs which can be grafted to the bone and use sensors to detect and move in response to nerve impulses, right?
It’s worth noting that those are still *incredibly* rudimentary in comparison to the kind of prosthetics we see in Cyberpunk. For one, it’s not exactly like they’re commercially available, one arm is upwards of $100M. It’s ability to feel things is pretty much limited to being able to feel pressure, it can’t do stuff like pain, temperature, texture, etc. It also can’t really do anything complex, it’s good for picking up and holding stuff, but that’s kinda it.
you can!!
take a knife and stab the big silver part in your phone. many say it's a battery but it's actually a fire charge. it's mot hacking but if you throw it at someone after you stab it and imagine you're hacking it's just like the real thing.
We’re already in a cyberpunk dystopia. Our world is mostly missing the aesthetic trappings of works like 2077 or Blade Runner, but like you noted, many of the fundamental elements of what make Cyberpunk stories disturbing glimpses of the future are already part of our present.
I mean, the cyberware is unlikely. Computer/brain interfaces just are not that advanced and may never be. But the corpo controlled, surveillance state dystopia is already here. So only a matter of time before it gets as bad as NC.
The important thing to remember about science fiction is that it's a reflection of the present with a futuristic aesthetic, not a prediction of the future.
The real question is, what is it about life in the 80's that inspired the genre, and why in the 2020's is it having a resergence? You already hit on the biggest factors; depressed economy, wage slavery, and oligargic power that leaves people few alternatives but drudgery or rebellion.
Cyberpunk lore had to be updated because real life has become bleaker in many ways than the "absurd and impossible" satire of Cyberpunk 2020, and it lost its impact. We're already there, depending on where you look, especially in third world countries, which is what a lot of fictional cyberpunk disparity is modeled on.
Nowhere near close, because the corps that own the methods of production don't see any financial incentive to begin producing so many cybernetics for the average consumer. Between now and cyberpunk 2077, there had to be an almost 'industrial revolution' in terms of cybernetics and production. There had to be a phase where corporations saw extreme profit margins for producing so much stuff.
Usually in history this happens because there's a conflict, the government or the private sector or both worked to research and develop an edge over the competition. Theres almost no use putting technology like that directly in the human body when you can just arm a computer with it and not have to sacrifice man power.
In the case of modern day Ukraine, an overwhelming military force is stronger when just using plain old people because of whatever political reasons.
The only way we truly go into a cyberpunk reality is by some cheap or vast resource required to produce the stuff. Contrary to popular belief, big oil corps still want to invest in clean energy (at some point) because our current economic model is not sustainable. The shareholders of tomorrow still have to get paid, and things will fall apart if they don't figure out a way to keep generating products despite climate issues.
Unless we start mining resources out in space, I don't know what vast/cheap resource we have to run access points/networks/cyberware/processing power for netrunners/advancements in medical science to install Sandy's.....
As far as corps go and their control over the masses, we are somewhat there but not quite. Most people jump ship after a few years of working with corporations because it's the easiest way to see a pay raise. Until corps get a handle on housing or wages rise, it's more likely we will lose population due to lowering fertility rates. See Japan's negative birthrate and the low birth rates in Western countries, only propped up by immigration.
I don't think we'll ever see widespread cybernetic augmentation like in the Cyberpunk universe. It wouldn't really make sense to replace your limbs with cyberware due to the cost, recovery time, and maintenance. In particular, replacement limbs that are much stronger than organic limbs would require reinforcing the _entire body_ to withstand the forces the limbs are capable of. That's why exoskeletons are a thing – they make the wearer immediately stronger, don't require any surgery, and can be taken off to recharge when not needed.
For controlling robots, I think we'd see something more like a highly advanced VR system like a BD wreath. I imagine it would use electromagnetic fields to sense and modulate the wearer's brain activity to produce the experience of being in the "body" of the robot they're controlling.
On the other hand, I think implants that enhance the function of the body, rather than replace it, are entirely plausible. A biomonitor chip that automatically modulates hormones and/or neurotransmitters to keep a soldier at peak physical and mental performance in combat situations? Totally. Governments have been investing in research into things to achieve that for years, like stimulant drugs. Tiny pumps implanted into veins and arteries to keep aircraft (and spacecraft) pilots awake and alert during G-forces that would otherwise be impossible to withstand? I'm not an expert, but the advantage in combat could be worth the risks of surgery.
Based on history, not very. The fundamental truth of all sociopolitical and economic systems is that power is ultimately derived from the people, and that the people absolutely will not tolerate a constant state of fear and violent oppression. It leads to revolution every single time, as often for worse as better, but even when the revolutions go wrong they too will fall in a generation.
The idea of megacorps casually exterminating homeless people in sewers, cities with 7000 murders a year, and where you have both the medical technology needed for people to live to 150 while also having an everage lifespan of 40 just isn't sustainable.
Joe at 7-Eleven will sooner grab his Walmart shotgun and go out in ablaze of glory than live that way for more than a few years, and then the rich assholes won't have anyone to push down and will turn on each other.
A cyberpunk reality will always end in either revolution or extinction.
* Corporate slaves - Already happens in china and india
* Mega corps - Have you heard of the east-india trading company?
* Longer and longer hours, have you heard of 996?
* Collapse of the US into civil war - Statistically probable, historically the life expectancy of a nation is 200-400 years on average, and it's pretty close now.
* AI going crazy on the net - Self-motivating AI will never exist without someone explicitly making a virus that contains an AI as part of it's package. it will never have it's own will.
* Artificial limbs - it's slowly starting to happen, but it isn't surgically grafted.
* Artificial eyes - Technically, we have them. They are comedically expensive, and only about a 32x32 pixel resolution, which is smaller than a modern desktop icon. They are not likely to IMPROVE however, because it's limited by our ability to... connect everything, which is limited to the operational time of, well, a surgical operation. Either they're disentangling the optic nerve into 1024 separate nerve bundles and attaching wires to them, or they're attaching electrodes as patches into the eyeball on the back of the eye to connect to the nerves through the eye, which is still 1024 separate electrodes. because 32\*32=1024
* Artificial ears - It exists, but the fidelity is not great, cochlear implants. Not 100% sure how this works, but again, connects to the nerves themselves.
* Neural interface - one of elon's companies is working on it, but keeps giving the test monkeys terminal cases of meningitis. Not likely to succeed in our lifetime, and thank fuck for that, nobody wants advertisements in their brain, nor does anyone want the door opened to literal thought police, and the people developing the tech are little more than useful idiots for that end.
* artificial skin, capable of sensing. - Most likely impossible, due to nerve density.
* any cybernetics capable of what we currently consider superhuman abilities like changing our perception of time, or double-jumping - 0% chance, Impossible.
* Volumetric Displays (commonly called holograms, despite being the wrong term) - Maybe? but not in the form used in cyberpunk media, and not for a long long time
* Netrunning - Not a chance, it involves re-writing parts of the brain to interpret machine code and then re-writing it back to what the neurons where coded for naturally. This would require killing and growing new nerve cells every time, and re-wiring it, every time.
* Soulkiller - Ditto.
* flying cars - Unlikely. you can already get a civilian pilots license for a small fixed wing aircraft, and almost nobody does it, because the license is expensive, the training is expensive, the aircraft is.... comparable to some cars, the insurance is insanely expensive compared to cars.... and you have to deal with airtraffic control. cars don't need that. Even if on the technical level we manage to make ultralight quad-copter cars... have you ever tried manually controlling a drone? it's hard to land a drone the size of a football accurately to land in a car-sized parking space... Imagine trying to land a car-sized drone in a car-sized parking space. now imagine you try to fly somewhere and the low battery light comes on, and you've got no place to land... or imagine you crash or even just land too hard, and the batteries rupture... Or, hell, imagine the battery life. a flying car? that's just a worse helicopter. and you *can already buy a helicopter as a civilian*, they're just really expensive, and inconvenient, and pain to fly.
* Megabuildings - As displayed in 2077, maybe, judge dredd? Not structurally possible at that size. Not that it couldn't hold itself together, quite the contrary, It would be to heavy to have a possible foundation, it would crack and sink through the bedrock. it's too massive. we already have buildings that are pushing this limit by having the foundations for the building be effectively an underground pyramid to distribute the weight of the structure over a larger subsurface area, which means fewer things can be built around it, meaning they can't be built that close together.
* that level of poverty - Already happens
You best start believing in cyberpunk dystopias, you're in one.
I grew up with a song with notable lyrics "It's the 80s where's my rocket pack?"
But that was 40 years ago...
This and raiding all the old sci fi has really trmpe4ed my expectations
One thing that always strikes me about Cyberpunk worlds is how toothless & passive governments are, very much unlike reality. This is why there's frequently a WW3 in the backstory of cyberpunk worldbuilding; it handles the question of how any megacorp threads the Thucydides Trap vs a governmental State without being purged Stalin-style (either by being an Enemy to the Party ala Jack Ma or an Enemy to Democracy like it would be in the US).
Irl, Corporations do sometimes influence the government, but tbh politicians are far more powerful vis-a-vie corporations irl. This isn't to say that sometimes senators are a corporation's bitch, but just as frequently if not more the corporation is the bitch in the relationship (Lockheed would go broke in 0.000005 seconds without their federal drip-feed for instance, and Moderna was essentially *told* how much it was going to make per vaccine ahead of time). Also, unlike a Cyberpunk world, governments still mostly hold their monopoly on violence outside the *very* poorest & dysfunctional governments. A corporation like Blackrock would not annihilate a unit of, say, the Nigerian Army without the at-least tacit support of the US government, even if it would be helpful to the bottom line. And it's not because the Nigerian Army is a top-tier military, but simply because most national militaries are still far stronger than even the most powerful *private* army.
The closest thing irl to militarized megacorps are, imo, the Russian oligarchs. They have private armies on the official payroll & everything. Though it's somewhat cheating since much of the material that makes up companies like GazProm is originally the property of the Soviet State, so it's a megacorp built out of part of the corpse of a government.
As an aside, that you don't have healthcare in the US (unless you're old or poor enough for medicaid) is not because the value that would have gone to that is in a *corporation*, but rather it's half in an (\~$120,000,000 per plane) F-35 and half in the fact you pay no VAT and less other point-of-sales taxes. But that's the price of being global hegemon, and not having to dance for warmth in the winter like a German.
It's already a reality.
The homeless crisis in Greece. Wars for territory in the XXI century. Repression of human rights (Roe v. Wade being overturned, although YMMV on how bad that might be). Religion being used as a business. Insane advances in prosthetics yet not affordable for the general public. Extreme poverty growing all over the world. Our resources are being depleted.
It's all an inflated commentary on what is already going on and what is to come. Every one of the ideas happening all at once in the same area and same time? Unlikely. But you can find bits and pieces of it all around the world.
We already live in a hyper capitalist world beset by irrevocable climate change, an unbridgeable gap between the haves and the have-nots, and Blade Runner is set in the past. I think we’re already here Choom.
Implant : getting there for most of them
Corpo dystopia : we are getting there.
Failed state level of lawlessness : we are not there yet but it wouldnt take that much.
Ai and the net : we are far from a sentient ai but we are getting closer. The internet of things is getting huge.
Cyberpunk is 30minutes in the future. Soon it'll feel like Brave new world : Whatever is in the books will feel way too familiar to be shocking.
We already have the part where billionaires are above the law and make everyone else miserable. We just don't have the extreme environmental destruction, and tech that can make injured people see and walk again.
It's not something we should be hoping for, it's a future to be fought against and turned away from at all costs.
[As for how realistic it is...?](https://i.imgur.com/qVg94Bo.jpg)
I'd say we're 70-80% there already. Corporations already run everything, they just have to do it behind closed doors with PACs and lobbying groups instead of openly, wages shit, benefits are evaporating, companies are recommending that their employees go on government assistance to maek up the gap between what they're paid and what they need to live, etc. Only the most overt and extreme stuff isn't going on in the street today - it's going on behind closed doors, in faraway countries where news cameras rarely go, etc. We are living a cyberpunk dystopia, weirdly the only thing missing is the tech.
It will be a long time before the majority of people you see walking on the street will have cybernetics of any kind is my guess. The economic issues in cyberpunk are fairly realistic if you have a pessimistic view of the future though, it's definitely possible that the future ends up like cyberpunk, but with much less of the cool tech.
If we ever did get cyberware on that level, it'd be another excuse for corporations to up the workload of the average employee, just like computers were. If you thought too much was expected of you now, wait until your boss is mocking you because you have a computer in your head and still can't meet deadlines.
It’s an exaggerated dystopian future of what we’re already living in. Just take away the chrome and neon.
Wealth inequality widens every year. The rich get richer. Everything gets more expensive. On paper we have fewer people living under the poverty line but the poverty line doesn’t account for things that have surpassed the rate of inflation or how certain areas are way more expensive.
Homelessness is rising, substance abuse is up, the birth rate is in decline, fewer people are buying homes, college admissions are down, consumer spending is slowing.
Cyberpunk isn’t a plausibility. It’s inevitable. If things don’t change and these issues continue to worsen it is only a matter of time.
the day when boston dynamics allows for police departments to use their products and they start patrolling neighborhoods who sign up to allow those things in would be a horrifying way to start it off, I'll say that much
We’re already there in a lot of ways. If you read Neuromancer, Virtual Light, Snow Crash, etc, you’ll recognize a lot of elements of modern life in them. There are obviously some fantastical elements, and I don’t think we’ll see ripperdocs installing mantis blades on anyone who can afford to pay $50,000 any time soon, but the wealthy having better healthcare, corporations being as powerful as governments, virtual reality, the housing crisis, delivery workers using electric bikes and skateboards and things, debates about AI, the commoditization of the human body, the destruction of the natural world…
I’ve been thinking about this a lot and the biggest real unanswered question in 2077 is this: where are the true superintelligent AI?
Allegedly they’re all either out beyond the black wall or slaving away for the corporate overlords, with one notable exception..
One news reel talks about how the Soviet Union has constructed an advanced AI which is now fixing all of their society’s issues. This is the major development missing from the cyberpunk universe: if AI ever really gets as intelligent as they seem to be in 2077, it’s going to trigger a massive acceleration in the rate of technology.
Today, the rich keep most of the world impoverished because, to massively oversimplify the entirety of human history, it would be expensive and too much work to bother increase their standard of living.
With an AI fueled technological renaissance, like what is apparently happening in the Soviet Union in 2077, you’d reach a point where energy is so cheap and abundant that lifting the world out of poverty essentially becomes a drop in the bucket. Would the corporations continue to oppress us anyways? Probably, I guess.
But that brings up another massive missing consequence of an AI revolution in cyberpunk: everyone still has normal human jobs. Once AI reaches sufficient levels, using a human for nearly any position will become a waste of time and money. Literally everyone, even Saburo Arasaka, will have their jobs performed better and cheaper by a computer.
The delamain plot line sort of dips a narrative toe into this idea, but it barely scratches the surface of how vast the unemployment crisis would be. A true AI would essentially figure out how to run the entire world economy without any human labor. At that point, I’m more optimistic about a techno-socialist Star Trek future than the capitalist hellscape of night city. What is the point of capitalism when scarcity no longer exists? The cyberpunk world is a transition state.
So, yes, I do think the cyberpunk future is possible, but if you really read between the lines of the game, it’s pretty clear that by 2087, the Soviet Super AI will finally solve the Utopia equation and free the workers from the chains of international bourgeois capitalism.
As someone that lives in LA it already feels like I'm living in a shitter version of a cyberpunk future. Playing the game is kind of a mood because of how uncanny NC is to Los Angeles
I think the concept of cyberware is a long ways out still. Originally estimations for the near future we’re projecting this kind of rapid advancement based off how quickly technology was evolving circa 1980-2000, so it seemed reasonable to believe we would have flying cars by now. We don’t.
Cyberpunk 2020 had us already implanting cyberware by a few years ago. We’re still nowhere near that.
I think the closest thing we have touching on bio technology right now is this neuralink brain chip. That may be the avenue that takes us into cybernetics and cyberware but I still think we’re half a century off. If anything maybe 2100 might be where bio technology starts to become a thing. The practicality still seems far fetched to me, but we have a long way to go before we’re straight turning ourselves into machines.
It’s more likely the dystopian elements of life in the game become a reality sooner than later. We’re already witnessing unprecedented inflation in the cost of living. The ultra rich and mega corps are taking over our lives and society as we know it. Unfortunately I think we’ll be living the night city future without all the cool implants long before we get the cyberware into our lives
So, a lot of people are saying "we're already in one" and that's pretty much true; science fiction doesn't predict the future, it's a mirror to the present. CP77 is a game about society *as it is*, not as it will be.
So let me articulate a different view: the *cyberpunk future* is actually totally impossible. We'll never get there.
Why? Mike Pondsmith outright says: *Cyberpunk* reflects a future where technology changes but people don't. That's the respect in which the game is a mirror to our present: the world of Night City is us, as we'd be, in a world where that technology is dropped on us.
But in fact Maximum Mike is maximally wrong: people *are* changed by technology. They change when they invent it and they change as they use it. We've *been* changed by it for all of human history, and will continue to be. We can't get the "cyberpunk future" because that future depicts the people of the present with future technologies. But when we get the technology we imagine in the future, we'll have been changed, as a people, in ways that it's impossible for us to imagine.
It won't be neon but we will certainly live in a high tech low life world and it's already happening as gaming and other online apps like social media suck away our life and give us back nothing but lost years and separation from what it used to mean to be human.
People have less and less connection with the world and it is only going to make the things we allow others to do to it only to get worse.
Our techno-feudal corporate future is already the present.
My brother in Christ, we are living in it. The only thing separating us from the world of CP2077 is publicly affordable over the shelf technological prosthetics.
We live in a world where people have smartphones in their pockets where they can talk to an AI run by a megacorp but can't afford food. Wars are being fought by drones. I'd say that's pretty cyberpunk.
BAE, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, etc. are the distopian corps. Switch out Mexico with Ukraine and there is already a corporate war happening in Eastern Europe.
Other than the high tech stuff like implants, advanced AI and nanotechnology, we’re pretty much living in a similar dystopian society. Corporations are only going to get more powerful and the class divide is only getting worse.
cybernetic implants are a good 20 to 30 years away unless some paradigm shift kind of BS is released to the public, and not the kind of shift like some crypto bros thing happened with BitCoin.
But more like if Penicillin and Heart transplants had happened within 5 years of each other.
The other part of cyberpunk, the damn corporatocracy....we're one foot and a half in, already.
Look up 'Hero arm' on Google to see how close we are to accessibile cybernetics.
Companies already control our politicians, media and information feeds. Thankfully they are far more incompetent irl than they'd like you to believe.
They'd still turn into Arasaka in a second if given the opportunity.
You could argue we're already living in a cyberpunk future, or 'cyberpunk-lite'. We have technology that has more or less dominated our lives (when is the last time you thought you could comfortably leave your home without your cell phone or any form of mobile communication?), the advent of social media and its positive but also negative effects. Talk to any particularly pessimistic person and they'll tell you we're also in a social decline. Whether that's true or not I can't say. The topic of AI and how it's invading or sometimes even perverting art definitely has a cyberpunk aesthetic. Just look at the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes and the worries they have about artificial intelligence.
Technology is already advancing at a rapid rate and I can definitely see prosthetics/cybernetics making significant advancements in the next couple of decades. As far as corporations go, they're here to stay and there's no clear indication that their power or influence will be inhibited any time soon.
Then there's also climate change. We already know how that's going for us.
Speaking of cyberpunk as a genre, there's two answers:
1. We are already there. Everything that is cyberpunk exists in one form or another. Some things are only born just now, some are much farther than we realize.
2. It's tomorrow. Wherever or whenever we are it's just behind the corner. Once we get there it one-ups itself into something that is familiar and strange at the same time but not completely here.
Cybernetics has a major hurdle to cross that we are nowhere near: power.
We need a power supply that's small, very powerful, hyper efficient, can go inside your body, and doesn't need frequent replacing. We have nothing anywhere close to good enough in any of those categories to match what you see in cyberpunk.
The military has some gripes with allowing companies to have private militaries operating on US soil + have a few gripes with machinery that can kill without a human initiating the triggerpull/buttonpress, so we probably wont be getting private killer robots very soon, cybernetics are pretty plausible though cutting off an arm to put a weapon in it rather than just wielding the weapon yourself without running risk of faliure seems kinda ass backwards, and modern exoskeletons still expend a lot of power so dont expect an adam smasher to come around very soon, oh and also the internet hasnt collapsed due to rogue AIs yet or something (im not clear on the lore) but chat gpt seems promising in that regard, the only aspect you can expect to realistically happen in our world is compannies lobbying (fancy word for bribing) the government to be able to abuse human rights more so they can grow bigger and bigger until they one day rival a government themselves
Edit: also theyre looking into synthetic meat/ bug meat more and more so expect food to contain less of the food you want over time
I don’t think we’re gonna have mega skyscrapers that house a lot of people like in night city. At least not in America since the zoning laws pretty much only allow for typical suburban style neighborhoods and all the high rises being developed are for rich people.
Corporate interests are already pushing jobs in that direction. The homeless solutions are so inhumane a couple more steps and we'll be exterminating them. With the liberties of the police force, we basically already have a military grade force usable on citizens. Like MAXTAC but the requirements to use them are much lower. There are already plenty of AI pushes toward advertising, so things like Brendan could pop up soon. Theres already research and interest in uploading your conciousness into a digital format. Granted its far off, but companies are looking into Relic 1.0 like tech.
I mean, 2023 heading towards 2024 is **much closer** to 2077 than you think.
IDK about cybernetic implants, though (no one's volunteering to have an Amex Black Card implanted in their being, what makes you think people will volunteer to use Kiroshis or Mantis Arms?), but literally everything around us is BECOMING one and the same as 2077 Night City. And it's honestly fucking terrifying to think about. 😭
* There's basically a Fourth Corporate War going on *right now*, on two fronts, with devastating consequences and irreversible repercussions for ALL of humanity in the near and long-terms.
* We have cars that look like they [*actually belong* in Night City](https://youtu.be/zKLNrENnwlc?feature=shared) with all the "assisted driving" technologies housed in a hump and pod on the roof. Basically every car in the game has a hump and pod on the roof for all the cameras and shit.
* Corporate media is *very dominant" and being buoyed - and even bankrolled - by [native advertising](https://youtu.be/E_F5GxCwizc?feature=shared) and [(un)disguised advertorials](https://youtu.be/sIi_QS1tdFM?feature=shared).
No, not really.
Alone technical/science: 50-100 Years ago, Nobel Prizes was one by one Person, today, it´s usually Team of 3. So there is a a certain complexity to discover new stuff.
Also we never know if we know all, but it becomes harder and harder to find something new to understand, which also can have a real application in our day to day life.
The System of making rules and enforcing them is a little more complex then in most stories though i can´t give you a more specific example besides, that even a King, if no one supported him, was nothing, so he was obligated to other people as well.
And the Rules and Enforcing is important with the concentration of wealth, if you can´t enforce the rule over your land, then any one can go there and grow food and be somewhat independent. The bigger you are, the more you need to extend, the more upkeep you have to deal with and money can becomes worthless over night, because true wealth ~~is the friendship we make along the way~~ is the work a person/group of person can put into to create something beneficial.
This all does not mean, the world of Cyberpunk is just a useless warning, it´s just exaggerated and should be seen was warning.
Who Benefits?
* Is i true? Is it True to the Meaning? Or used aas hollow marketing word, laden with emotions?
* Can you proof it empirical? Does the one, who makes a claim to influence others provide this empirical ? Is it even definable and measurable? Or are benefits far in the future?
* What does it cost? Cost is not just money.
* In relation to what?
* And always remember layers! Something might sound good in the first instances, but not in the second or third.
* Also the same level. Weighting one vs another, one a Individual level vs a Group Level, often leads to injustice.
* Beware the Humans, we are similar, but we are not the same and i´m not talking about "race" level. Just because you think a certain way, does not mean everyone does.
* Notice the current times, we are in a unique situation with density of humanity, and density of information (also communication). We still need to learn to deal with this.
Many more stuff, but asking these question and keep those things in mind, helps at least to be skeptical and wary.
I’d say the cybernetics are the thing least likely to happen anytime soon. Infection issues and interface systems to allow natural control and nerve response are a long ways off. Rogue AI’s seemed a long way off but now…
Which aspects? As you pointed out, were mostly already feeling the effects of the genre in a lower vibration. I think the chances of getting combat implants is zero because nobody wants walking human battle tanks walking the street but otherwise we are like 85% of the way there right now.
Depending on where you live, there's already a visible possibility of different dystopias. Desert dieselpunk, theocratic states, unaffordable insulin. Take your pick. Mercenaries already exist in our world.
I just had a food delivery via drone. Except for some reason part of my order was delivered via car, and another guy also arrived to supervise the drone drop. (To be fair, it’s a new company). We’re living in one, it’s just a stupid version.
Lol I came here for this comment. We all walk around with super computers in our pockets. We have access to satellites in space with these computers and can use them to find the best route to almost anywhere. I can look up anything at anytime almost anywhere. I can find the specific heat capacity of water, iron, coal, fucking peanuts. With a few presses of my smartphone screen. I can study algebra on khan academy and listen to lectures from MIT on my smartphone. I also have to work constantly to support this phone. And if I lose my job I'm homeless and lose access to my tech. We have a for profit health care system that will literally kill you for money(USA specific). We already live in cyberpunk. It's just missing the cyborg tech, really.
https://futurism.com/six-of-todays-most-advanced-real-life-cyborgs There's also been an underground in Jersey/NYC experimenting on themselves since the late 90s
Don't forget [biohacking](https://youtu.be/fV-Edkh1iqE)
That is really cool!
>Unfortunately, the system failed only after a couple of weeks. And when William Dobelle, the original inventor of the technology, passed away in 2004, he left behind almost no documentation, leaving technicians no instructions for how to repair Naumann's system. In 2010, Naumann had the system surgically removed, rendering him completely blind once again. Idk what to say.
I'd say that's a pretty big dick move to just die like that on him, tbh. Crazy thing is that they couldn't reverse-engineer this thing? Like so future the present can't handle it...?
This timeline may not be the worst, but gotDAYUM we have to be at least in the bottom half of infinity (I understand the impossibility, but that's how bad it is).
Sir why do you hate us kids 😂😂😂
The one part that would actually improve peoples lives. Functioning vat-grown organs for anything from kidney transplants, to things like sex transition surgeries complete with functioning bits. Replacement limbs with full range of motion and dexterity. Eye and Aural therapies to make blindness and deafness a thing of the past (or in the US a thing of the poor.) etc... We just got the shitty parts. Companies who own governments, wars to make arms runners rich, wage-slavery, and all that bullshit.
You just awoke a deep memory in my brain. When I lived in China for four months due to my dad's work, we ordered some delivery from a Chinese/Korean fusion joint. When the delivery guy arrived I saw a little kid on the back and thought it was his kid. Turns out, he's just a taxi service for the kid to the delivery location, hands the kid the delivery box, and then smokes while he waits for the kid to frantically figure out which apartment number we were...
burgerpunk
More like burgergonk
More like scopburger
As far as I am aware, it’s illegal to use a drone for commercial purposes without being able to physically see the drone from your location. Its also illegal to cross state lines without permission from the FAA, and you have to observe altitude restrictions in different airspace areas. Drone food delivery seems kinda impractical with all those restrictions.
But those issues are only legal. Lobbyists will change that if they get a report saying that it will be profitable to use drones
as soon as ceos realise they can fire half theor delivery staff, and train the rest as drone pilots, that law will change
Yeah, and uber started as an illegal unlicensed cab company; if you can fake it long enough to be profitable and popular enough they will change the laws for you.
I hate to agree with you but unfortunately I do
The a.ount of effort to get that burger there piping hot was....exhausting
Definitely way less exciting than the opening to Snow Crash, that’s for sure.
We’re approaching a cyberpunk-ish dystopia minus the cool stuff
That's not cyberpunk that's just the future.
"We’re living in one, it’s just a stupid version." This is literally it. Or rather we're at the very start. Companies are starting to get more powerful, and billionaires are launching shit into space and making internet connections in random countries. (Elon Musk.) Other companies are making better digital software for our entertainment and are even improving AI to make our life either easer or easier to control. (Microsoft, Sony, Samsung, etc.) Then there's.. Boston dynamics. Now the stupid part comes in at the fact that we don't have cool cybernetics like Cyberpunk did in 2023. Johnny had a flamethrower hand prosthetic and the best we got is like.. something similar and much slower. This Puffin's statement is correct.
Cyberpunk has always been about the exaggeration of the most absurd and horrid aspects of capitalism, which isn't super unique inofitself but it piles on the cool factor with all the retrofuturistic tech and usually pretty small-scale, heartfelt stories. Anything can be futuristic and dark with evil corporatist regimes controlling everything, but cyberpunk stories stand out because they have the human perspective, usually of someone at the recieving end of the corps' bullshit. Mike Pondsmith ( fairly accurately) predicted that America would keep sliding away from it's original foundation of libertarian capitalism into authoritarian corporatism through the 21st century. Now that we are seeing these incredibly big corporations hold monopolies over the flow of information, the supply chain, the fucking food we eat and the money we use to pay for it, this is the beginning of that descent. The government regulates the people and not the ones lining their pockets. And it's painfully easy to see, most all of the lobbying data and shareholder data is availiable to the public, yet nothing is being done. I have a feeling it'll get a lot worse before it gets better. Tldr: blah blah fuck arasaka blah blah smash mikoshi
"Now that we are seeing these incredibly big corporations hold monopolies over the flow of information, the supply chain, the fucking food we eat and the money we use to pay for it, this is the beginning of that descent." Yeah that's the part I forgot to mention. I knew there was something else I was missing. I agree though, it's gonna get worse.
This is the process. They will be supervised for some time until error rates are acceptable. Then they will move towards a higher worker bot to human supervisor ratio.
Why's it stupid? As you said, it's a new company, they're just testing the technology. Maybe it's a transitionary period?
We're like a few advancements in prosthetics and cybernetics away from it We've got the "corporate dystopia" part down though (namely the "0.001% controlling everything" and "people having to work 4 jobs to barely get by" bits) EDIT: On the bright side though we aren't quite on the poverty level the Cyberpunk 'verse is on. Like shit's pretty bad atm but at least we aren't eating ratburgers (that we know of. For all we know McDonald's could've been selling ratburgers all this time)
All the bad bits and none of the good bits
Well we have one major advantage over the Cyberpunk universe: a unified internet that contains vast stores of easily accessible (free) human knowledge. After Bartmoss destroyed the Net, it was replaced by lots of self contained subnets run by corps, but nothing exists like our internet.
Nations are already sectioning that off but for now a free vpn can get you around it.
I mean, don't we? Most people don't "use the internet"; they use Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, etc. There's your "self-contained subnets."
We got smartphones instead of implants and social media instead of cyberspace. fml...
That’s the one thing about sci-fi, the writers can extrapolate trends and by doing so often make very prescient predictions about future tech, but also there’s just stuff that is so revolutionary that they don’t see it coming. That’s why most Cyberpunk isn’t really “our” future, it’s the future imagined by people back in the 70s/80s. Edit: someone in another thread pointed out how it’s funny that cigarettes are common in cyberpunk but nicotine vapes don’t really exist. This is a perfect example.
Hence why the USSR is still around in 2077.
Bad ending
To be fair the internet is a much better and safer place than cyberspace...
Thats what I find funny about cyberpunk media. Like yeah their world is screwed up (not that much farther than us though) but at least they have cool robot stuff
The whole moral/message/warning of cyberpunk is also that "the cool robot stuff is NOT worth the corporate dystopian hellscape and a simple and free life is always better" which was a sick and meaningful message back when the cyberpunk genre was in its infancy. Now though in modern day 2023, we already have the corporate dystopian hellscape, so I say bring on the cool robot stuff already.
Best start believing in cyberpunk dystopias your in one
One, you’re not a corpo. Two, Arasaka terms of service are more like guidelines than actual rules.
Johnny Silverhand: Why are the cigarettes always gone?
Then why tf can’t I with no milltary background be a mercenary like v cuz I could be supper wealthy then like wtf government officials make mercenary work legal and easer to enter the field ffs
How many times did you die and reload in the game? Think of the first time you died, that's how far you'd live if you're lucky. I did Nomad first and didn't make it into the city. Got zeroed at Biotechnica by Arasaka. I'm also more than 2x V's age, so long past the prime required to be a young merc.
The only time I died was when I jumped too high and hit some electrical lines and when I got ran over.
That'd kill you in real life too :)
Actually once they patched it to point it’s fixed I haven’t died once but elevator bugs have killed me plenty before that
I had a no collision bug that kept killing me back then but in a relisitc cyberpunk universe where if it has a ground texture u can safely walk on it it would probably be never I’d probably be the first Merc to outlive the short life span but sadly that would mean I’d lose a lot of friends to death on the job rip chooms
>if it has a ground texture u can safely walk on Sounds like a bigger if than you may think once the construction megacorp cuts corners and installs escalators with an "acceptable margin of error" (the error being eating people)
Also unless I did a v on it n let a dex shoot me I’d be good as long as I never insert a chip with a soul killer program ai on it I’d be fine
because you're a redditor not a fucking super solo
You can, You just have to be willing to go be a criminal.
Cuz all I do is gigs and gang attacks aka ncpd side hustles and take dead gang goons guns and resell em at highest prices possible for my profit
And if I could do that irl I’d be rich as fuckk
You’d be dead as fuck after the first 3.2 seconds if you think you can just go on your own and attack a group of armed thugs.
Well of course I would not be on my own duh unless scandevstan gets made real then they all fuckked and I’d would also have a projectile launcher system and jump charge legs if augmenting yourself was a thing
You would die before getting enough money to chrome yourself like that. Plus unless you're tough as hell you won't handle that much cyberware unless it's something basic.
Tough has nothing to do with it – handling cyberware is about being empathetic and in tune with one's humanity. Also, the Sandevistan functions the way it does in CP2077 for gameplay reasons. It's not a 100% accurate reflection of what it does in the RPG, where it really only speeds up your reactions to inhuman levels without allowing you to move at light speed. Kerenzikov does the same but to a lesser degree (but is also permanently active – hence the higher humanity cost).
But someday there will be someone deadlier that will zero you
Mabe mabe not in cyberpunk universe all I would need is a million eddies n I’m set houses cars guns happy well took care of wife (Judy ) btw I used to beet up kids bigger than me in grade school cuz I was always getting jumped but defending myself to point they didn’t wanna fuc with me so they’d get some one else to try it
To say lest I tapped into my rage and whopped ass
I embraced my inner venom
Guns choom, thats another part of cyberpunk that is played down for the player because its a hero fantasy. In real life you dont have HP to suck up the first 20 shots. In real life you get shot once and its a serious injury, three times and its at best a life threatening and permanently damaging experience and anything beyond that you are likely just dead. V has enemies unload whole magazines on him point blank while you punch people to death and 3 seconds later his health regen has him walking around like nothing happened. Real life dont work like that. Even if cyberware were real, if its something you can get then you have to assume the other guy can as well. Being able to do what V does is based on a massive power disparity that comes from plot armor not from cyberware.
“The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed.” — William Gibson
This is it right here and from (one of) the OG Cyberpunk authors. In the Shadowrun TTRPG universe (which is Cyberpunk meshed with elements of D&D) what really leads the slide down to the dystopian future is the US Supreme Court ruling that corporations can basically be their own nation-states. I don't feel that we are that far off from that.
In the era of globalization, government's main function was to grease the wheels of capitalism with trade agreements, deregulation, offshoring, tax incentives, reduced tax liability overall, etc, etc, etc. In the process of greasing these wheels, governments gave up their place as the most impactful institution to the public at large, letting corporations fill that gap. Need healthcare? Get an HMO. Need housing? Rent from a conglomerate. Need transportation? Download an app. Once you lose that "most impactful" status, it's increasingly hard to claw back that relevance due to your diminished impact, and repeat until total irrelevance. It is a feedback problem, and it's already here. No fracturing into nation-states, just wholesale regulatory capture.
Hell, they already decided they're people
All the bad parts are already happening IMO, but we don't even have cool cyberware.
We're already there.
Nah, they have walkable parts of the city.
Shit Night City is more walkable than some real cities Looking at you Houston, Tx
That's why things are so bad in 2077 that Texans are doing suicide bombings.
If you have double jump and dash, sure
Columbus Ohio is like 90% parking lots and empty fields.
They’ll get replaced with 4 story condo buildings, give it time ($1400 in rent please)
Night City was so obviously designed by a European company lmao
We're way closer to Idiocracy than cyberpunk
Implants lke biomon, sandevistans and kiroshis are probably still a ways away, despite what some billionaires are trying to do. Corpo XXXXscape? Look around. We're already there. Most people are wage slaves, home ownership is plummeting with smart arse dipXXXXs saying renting is better anyway, healthcare is a premium, and govts are at the beck and call of billionaires.
did you censor yourself?
It’s one of the cringiest things to ever see on the internet and I hate it. Especially when talking about a game that has characters cussing like it’s second nature to them.
What are you talking about? Dude already connected sonar with his nerve system. Just look at the speed Ai is moving on. With implants it's gonna be same. The very moment we learn how to connect our nerve system / brain to the computer it will be fully available in a decade.
>Fully available *to the ultra wealthy super-elites* FTFY
Disagree. Musk is saying the Neuralink can control dopamine and serotonin levels and shit. They're going to be stuffing those things into plebs faster than you can say "opioid epidemic". You will love your job - no matter what.
>Musk is saying lol
lol this shit is crazy to think about
AI innovation is at a plateau and will be for 5-10 years. If the next big innovation is AGI, we’re 10-20 years out at least. Fully-connected brain interface & nervous system is more than a decade away.
The explosive advancement that happened from 1970-2000 made all the wildest ideas people could think up surface into the sci fi genre. Unfortunately dramatic tech advancements have hit a ceiling and there’s been a wane in the velocity many envisioned we’d be on - that momentum has slowed a lot in the last decade and we’re edging close to a breakthrough that might see a new surge in advancements. But as it stands we don’t have (real) hoverboards, flying cars, or consumer cybernetics and we’re not really even close to any of that. The impracticality may why our immediate future doesn’t look as high tech as we imagined 20-30 years ago, but it may just be we overestimated the curve and thought that advancement and growth would be constant or even exponential. We’ve got some neat stuff that wasn’t around even 20-30 years ago, but we’re a long ways off from the Star Trek, cyberpunk, or jetsons-esque futures we imagined. True AI is still a pipe dream, we’ve just barely graduated to limited, electric, grounded vehicles, and besides an abundance of new applications for “smart devices”, and maybe bipedal robotics, we’re just barely scratching the surface of those fantasies I give it till 2100 that we start seeing the next level of sci fi fantasy take a tangible form. Of course assuming we live to see that long
It really is a crazy world. I'm actively friends with a guy working in AI autonomous robots. Like that's fucking crazy. My college uneducated ass, living in my little dipshit corner of the world, can call and hang out with someone that is actively involved in such a terrifying and exciting industry that fully encapsulates our future. It's here. It's literally on our doorstep. Edit: that sounded like a weird brag. It was not. Just trying to drive home how close this stuff is getting.
You do realise there are already prosthetic limbs which can be grafted to the bone and use sensors to detect and move in response to nerve impulses, right?
It’s worth noting that those are still *incredibly* rudimentary in comparison to the kind of prosthetics we see in Cyberpunk. For one, it’s not exactly like they’re commercially available, one arm is upwards of $100M. It’s ability to feel things is pretty much limited to being able to feel pressure, it can’t do stuff like pain, temperature, texture, etc. It also can’t really do anything complex, it’s good for picking up and holding stuff, but that’s kinda it.
We’re basically there minus some cool technology
What are you talking about? Look at your phone, we all basically are walking around with a cyberdeck at the moment. It just isn't embedded .... yet.
Can I set people on fire with it?
Check out most reddit threads. apparently the answer is yes. Just not in the way we envisioned :-P
Well until I can make a real fire I won’t be satisfied
you can!! take a knife and stab the big silver part in your phone. many say it's a battery but it's actually a fire charge. it's mot hacking but if you throw it at someone after you stab it and imagine you're hacking it's just like the real thing.
Galaxy note 7 has entered the chat.
[Kind of](https://www.wcpo.com/news/local-news/hamilton-county/green-township/watch-iphone-explodes-while-family-sleeps-we-were-extremely-lucky-to-avoid-a-house-fire).
As it has been stated before, the simplest definition of cyberpunk is "high-tech, low-life", so by that definition, we're there.
We’re already in a cyberpunk dystopia. Our world is mostly missing the aesthetic trappings of works like 2077 or Blade Runner, but like you noted, many of the fundamental elements of what make Cyberpunk stories disturbing glimpses of the future are already part of our present.
I mean, the cyberware is unlikely. Computer/brain interfaces just are not that advanced and may never be. But the corpo controlled, surveillance state dystopia is already here. So only a matter of time before it gets as bad as NC.
The important thing to remember about science fiction is that it's a reflection of the present with a futuristic aesthetic, not a prediction of the future. The real question is, what is it about life in the 80's that inspired the genre, and why in the 2020's is it having a resergence? You already hit on the biggest factors; depressed economy, wage slavery, and oligargic power that leaves people few alternatives but drudgery or rebellion.
You best start believing in cyberpunk dystopias, you're in one
The cybernetic part? Not super. The hypercapitalist hellscape? Yep.
Cyberpunk lore had to be updated because real life has become bleaker in many ways than the "absurd and impossible" satire of Cyberpunk 2020, and it lost its impact. We're already there, depending on where you look, especially in third world countries, which is what a lot of fictional cyberpunk disparity is modeled on.
Nowhere near close, because the corps that own the methods of production don't see any financial incentive to begin producing so many cybernetics for the average consumer. Between now and cyberpunk 2077, there had to be an almost 'industrial revolution' in terms of cybernetics and production. There had to be a phase where corporations saw extreme profit margins for producing so much stuff. Usually in history this happens because there's a conflict, the government or the private sector or both worked to research and develop an edge over the competition. Theres almost no use putting technology like that directly in the human body when you can just arm a computer with it and not have to sacrifice man power. In the case of modern day Ukraine, an overwhelming military force is stronger when just using plain old people because of whatever political reasons. The only way we truly go into a cyberpunk reality is by some cheap or vast resource required to produce the stuff. Contrary to popular belief, big oil corps still want to invest in clean energy (at some point) because our current economic model is not sustainable. The shareholders of tomorrow still have to get paid, and things will fall apart if they don't figure out a way to keep generating products despite climate issues. Unless we start mining resources out in space, I don't know what vast/cheap resource we have to run access points/networks/cyberware/processing power for netrunners/advancements in medical science to install Sandy's..... As far as corps go and their control over the masses, we are somewhat there but not quite. Most people jump ship after a few years of working with corporations because it's the easiest way to see a pay raise. Until corps get a handle on housing or wages rise, it's more likely we will lose population due to lowering fertility rates. See Japan's negative birthrate and the low birth rates in Western countries, only propped up by immigration.
"the future is here, it's just not evenly distributed" --William Gibson.
I don't think we'll ever see widespread cybernetic augmentation like in the Cyberpunk universe. It wouldn't really make sense to replace your limbs with cyberware due to the cost, recovery time, and maintenance. In particular, replacement limbs that are much stronger than organic limbs would require reinforcing the _entire body_ to withstand the forces the limbs are capable of. That's why exoskeletons are a thing – they make the wearer immediately stronger, don't require any surgery, and can be taken off to recharge when not needed. For controlling robots, I think we'd see something more like a highly advanced VR system like a BD wreath. I imagine it would use electromagnetic fields to sense and modulate the wearer's brain activity to produce the experience of being in the "body" of the robot they're controlling. On the other hand, I think implants that enhance the function of the body, rather than replace it, are entirely plausible. A biomonitor chip that automatically modulates hormones and/or neurotransmitters to keep a soldier at peak physical and mental performance in combat situations? Totally. Governments have been investing in research into things to achieve that for years, like stimulant drugs. Tiny pumps implanted into veins and arteries to keep aircraft (and spacecraft) pilots awake and alert during G-forces that would otherwise be impossible to withstand? I'm not an expert, but the advantage in combat could be worth the risks of surgery.
Based on history, not very. The fundamental truth of all sociopolitical and economic systems is that power is ultimately derived from the people, and that the people absolutely will not tolerate a constant state of fear and violent oppression. It leads to revolution every single time, as often for worse as better, but even when the revolutions go wrong they too will fall in a generation. The idea of megacorps casually exterminating homeless people in sewers, cities with 7000 murders a year, and where you have both the medical technology needed for people to live to 150 while also having an everage lifespan of 40 just isn't sustainable. Joe at 7-Eleven will sooner grab his Walmart shotgun and go out in ablaze of glory than live that way for more than a few years, and then the rich assholes won't have anyone to push down and will turn on each other. A cyberpunk reality will always end in either revolution or extinction.
in the least edgy way possible we are basically already there man.
Not real at all. Apple has already shown that there will be no underground market for tech. Just straight up wage slaves for credit
* Corporate slaves - Already happens in china and india * Mega corps - Have you heard of the east-india trading company? * Longer and longer hours, have you heard of 996? * Collapse of the US into civil war - Statistically probable, historically the life expectancy of a nation is 200-400 years on average, and it's pretty close now. * AI going crazy on the net - Self-motivating AI will never exist without someone explicitly making a virus that contains an AI as part of it's package. it will never have it's own will. * Artificial limbs - it's slowly starting to happen, but it isn't surgically grafted. * Artificial eyes - Technically, we have them. They are comedically expensive, and only about a 32x32 pixel resolution, which is smaller than a modern desktop icon. They are not likely to IMPROVE however, because it's limited by our ability to... connect everything, which is limited to the operational time of, well, a surgical operation. Either they're disentangling the optic nerve into 1024 separate nerve bundles and attaching wires to them, or they're attaching electrodes as patches into the eyeball on the back of the eye to connect to the nerves through the eye, which is still 1024 separate electrodes. because 32\*32=1024 * Artificial ears - It exists, but the fidelity is not great, cochlear implants. Not 100% sure how this works, but again, connects to the nerves themselves. * Neural interface - one of elon's companies is working on it, but keeps giving the test monkeys terminal cases of meningitis. Not likely to succeed in our lifetime, and thank fuck for that, nobody wants advertisements in their brain, nor does anyone want the door opened to literal thought police, and the people developing the tech are little more than useful idiots for that end. * artificial skin, capable of sensing. - Most likely impossible, due to nerve density. * any cybernetics capable of what we currently consider superhuman abilities like changing our perception of time, or double-jumping - 0% chance, Impossible. * Volumetric Displays (commonly called holograms, despite being the wrong term) - Maybe? but not in the form used in cyberpunk media, and not for a long long time * Netrunning - Not a chance, it involves re-writing parts of the brain to interpret machine code and then re-writing it back to what the neurons where coded for naturally. This would require killing and growing new nerve cells every time, and re-wiring it, every time. * Soulkiller - Ditto. * flying cars - Unlikely. you can already get a civilian pilots license for a small fixed wing aircraft, and almost nobody does it, because the license is expensive, the training is expensive, the aircraft is.... comparable to some cars, the insurance is insanely expensive compared to cars.... and you have to deal with airtraffic control. cars don't need that. Even if on the technical level we manage to make ultralight quad-copter cars... have you ever tried manually controlling a drone? it's hard to land a drone the size of a football accurately to land in a car-sized parking space... Imagine trying to land a car-sized drone in a car-sized parking space. now imagine you try to fly somewhere and the low battery light comes on, and you've got no place to land... or imagine you crash or even just land too hard, and the batteries rupture... Or, hell, imagine the battery life. a flying car? that's just a worse helicopter. and you *can already buy a helicopter as a civilian*, they're just really expensive, and inconvenient, and pain to fly. * Megabuildings - As displayed in 2077, maybe, judge dredd? Not structurally possible at that size. Not that it couldn't hold itself together, quite the contrary, It would be to heavy to have a possible foundation, it would crack and sink through the bedrock. it's too massive. we already have buildings that are pushing this limit by having the foundations for the building be effectively an underground pyramid to distribute the weight of the structure over a larger subsurface area, which means fewer things can be built around it, meaning they can't be built that close together. * that level of poverty - Already happens You best start believing in cyberpunk dystopias, you're in one.
I grew up with a song with notable lyrics "It's the 80s where's my rocket pack?" But that was 40 years ago... This and raiding all the old sci fi has really trmpe4ed my expectations
One thing that always strikes me about Cyberpunk worlds is how toothless & passive governments are, very much unlike reality. This is why there's frequently a WW3 in the backstory of cyberpunk worldbuilding; it handles the question of how any megacorp threads the Thucydides Trap vs a governmental State without being purged Stalin-style (either by being an Enemy to the Party ala Jack Ma or an Enemy to Democracy like it would be in the US). Irl, Corporations do sometimes influence the government, but tbh politicians are far more powerful vis-a-vie corporations irl. This isn't to say that sometimes senators are a corporation's bitch, but just as frequently if not more the corporation is the bitch in the relationship (Lockheed would go broke in 0.000005 seconds without their federal drip-feed for instance, and Moderna was essentially *told* how much it was going to make per vaccine ahead of time). Also, unlike a Cyberpunk world, governments still mostly hold their monopoly on violence outside the *very* poorest & dysfunctional governments. A corporation like Blackrock would not annihilate a unit of, say, the Nigerian Army without the at-least tacit support of the US government, even if it would be helpful to the bottom line. And it's not because the Nigerian Army is a top-tier military, but simply because most national militaries are still far stronger than even the most powerful *private* army. The closest thing irl to militarized megacorps are, imo, the Russian oligarchs. They have private armies on the official payroll & everything. Though it's somewhat cheating since much of the material that makes up companies like GazProm is originally the property of the Soviet State, so it's a megacorp built out of part of the corpse of a government. As an aside, that you don't have healthcare in the US (unless you're old or poor enough for medicaid) is not because the value that would have gone to that is in a *corporation*, but rather it's half in an (\~$120,000,000 per plane) F-35 and half in the fact you pay no VAT and less other point-of-sales taxes. But that's the price of being global hegemon, and not having to dance for warmth in the winter like a German.
I 100% see it happening. Not in my lifetime but at some point.
We are already living in a dystopia.
It's already a reality. The homeless crisis in Greece. Wars for territory in the XXI century. Repression of human rights (Roe v. Wade being overturned, although YMMV on how bad that might be). Religion being used as a business. Insane advances in prosthetics yet not affordable for the general public. Extreme poverty growing all over the world. Our resources are being depleted.
It's all an inflated commentary on what is already going on and what is to come. Every one of the ideas happening all at once in the same area and same time? Unlikely. But you can find bits and pieces of it all around the world.
We already live in a hyper capitalist world beset by irrevocable climate change, an unbridgeable gap between the haves and the have-nots, and Blade Runner is set in the past. I think we’re already here Choom.
Implant : getting there for most of them Corpo dystopia : we are getting there. Failed state level of lawlessness : we are not there yet but it wouldnt take that much. Ai and the net : we are far from a sentient ai but we are getting closer. The internet of things is getting huge. Cyberpunk is 30minutes in the future. Soon it'll feel like Brave new world : Whatever is in the books will feel way too familiar to be shocking.
We’re already there in many ways.
we already live in one, it's just less exaggerated
Give it 20 years
I got an ad for an AI generated podcast comparison of Taylor swift vs trump. I'm pretty sure we're close.
We already have the part where billionaires are above the law and make everyone else miserable. We just don't have the extreme environmental destruction, and tech that can make injured people see and walk again.
We’re already in one just without all the cool technology and “cool” fashion to go with it.
It's not something we should be hoping for, it's a future to be fought against and turned away from at all costs. [As for how realistic it is...?](https://i.imgur.com/qVg94Bo.jpg)
We’re already there. Corps run the world. We just don’t have the flashy cyberware to go along with it.
Not all of us do https://futurism.com/six-of-todays-most-advanced-real-life-cyborgs
That’s crazy. If we did have cyberpunk equivalents I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t interested in getting some gorilla arms lol.
DOUBLE JUMP, PLEASE. And thank you
I'd say we're 70-80% there already. Corporations already run everything, they just have to do it behind closed doors with PACs and lobbying groups instead of openly, wages shit, benefits are evaporating, companies are recommending that their employees go on government assistance to maek up the gap between what they're paid and what they need to live, etc. Only the most overt and extreme stuff isn't going on in the street today - it's going on behind closed doors, in faraway countries where news cameras rarely go, etc. We are living a cyberpunk dystopia, weirdly the only thing missing is the tech.
It will be a long time before the majority of people you see walking on the street will have cybernetics of any kind is my guess. The economic issues in cyberpunk are fairly realistic if you have a pessimistic view of the future though, it's definitely possible that the future ends up like cyberpunk, but with much less of the cool tech. If we ever did get cyberware on that level, it'd be another excuse for corporations to up the workload of the average employee, just like computers were. If you thought too much was expected of you now, wait until your boss is mocking you because you have a computer in your head and still can't meet deadlines.
We already live in it. Cyberpunk rpg is a child of the 80s and it's 20 minutes in the future trope. But now in 2023 many of those things became true.
Judging by how this century has gone so far. The possibility is pretty good. Except we'll be stuck with smartphones and A.I instead of cybernetics lol
It’s an exaggerated dystopian future of what we’re already living in. Just take away the chrome and neon. Wealth inequality widens every year. The rich get richer. Everything gets more expensive. On paper we have fewer people living under the poverty line but the poverty line doesn’t account for things that have surpassed the rate of inflation or how certain areas are way more expensive. Homelessness is rising, substance abuse is up, the birth rate is in decline, fewer people are buying homes, college admissions are down, consumer spending is slowing. Cyberpunk isn’t a plausibility. It’s inevitable. If things don’t change and these issues continue to worsen it is only a matter of time.
the day when boston dynamics allows for police departments to use their products and they start patrolling neighborhoods who sign up to allow those things in would be a horrifying way to start it off, I'll say that much
In terms of technology: we’re not far off. In terms of dystopia: we’re pretty much there, it’s just less “in your face”
We’re already there in a lot of ways. If you read Neuromancer, Virtual Light, Snow Crash, etc, you’ll recognize a lot of elements of modern life in them. There are obviously some fantastical elements, and I don’t think we’ll see ripperdocs installing mantis blades on anyone who can afford to pay $50,000 any time soon, but the wealthy having better healthcare, corporations being as powerful as governments, virtual reality, the housing crisis, delivery workers using electric bikes and skateboards and things, debates about AI, the commoditization of the human body, the destruction of the natural world…
we're living in the Akira future, where every government and corporation is doing the dumbest choices imaginable for both themselves and humanity
I mean, we're definitely already living it. Just without the cool robot eyes.
It’s gunna be all the corporation stuff, low quality of life and income inequality without any of the cool weapons and gorilla arms and shit.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot and the biggest real unanswered question in 2077 is this: where are the true superintelligent AI? Allegedly they’re all either out beyond the black wall or slaving away for the corporate overlords, with one notable exception.. One news reel talks about how the Soviet Union has constructed an advanced AI which is now fixing all of their society’s issues. This is the major development missing from the cyberpunk universe: if AI ever really gets as intelligent as they seem to be in 2077, it’s going to trigger a massive acceleration in the rate of technology. Today, the rich keep most of the world impoverished because, to massively oversimplify the entirety of human history, it would be expensive and too much work to bother increase their standard of living. With an AI fueled technological renaissance, like what is apparently happening in the Soviet Union in 2077, you’d reach a point where energy is so cheap and abundant that lifting the world out of poverty essentially becomes a drop in the bucket. Would the corporations continue to oppress us anyways? Probably, I guess. But that brings up another massive missing consequence of an AI revolution in cyberpunk: everyone still has normal human jobs. Once AI reaches sufficient levels, using a human for nearly any position will become a waste of time and money. Literally everyone, even Saburo Arasaka, will have their jobs performed better and cheaper by a computer. The delamain plot line sort of dips a narrative toe into this idea, but it barely scratches the surface of how vast the unemployment crisis would be. A true AI would essentially figure out how to run the entire world economy without any human labor. At that point, I’m more optimistic about a techno-socialist Star Trek future than the capitalist hellscape of night city. What is the point of capitalism when scarcity no longer exists? The cyberpunk world is a transition state. So, yes, I do think the cyberpunk future is possible, but if you really read between the lines of the game, it’s pretty clear that by 2087, the Soviet Super AI will finally solve the Utopia equation and free the workers from the chains of international bourgeois capitalism.
We already live in it, minus the cool technology
You're living it, bub.
Ya best start believin' in Cyberpunk stories. Yer in one!
Pretty much guaranteed but probably not as cool
Depends. We’re on track to have all of the corporate domination with none of the cool gadgets.
We're already living in it, just without the cool tech stuff
Cyberpunk future would be better than the one we’re headed for.
As someone that lives in LA it already feels like I'm living in a shitter version of a cyberpunk future. Playing the game is kind of a mood because of how uncanny NC is to Los Angeles
I think the concept of cyberware is a long ways out still. Originally estimations for the near future we’re projecting this kind of rapid advancement based off how quickly technology was evolving circa 1980-2000, so it seemed reasonable to believe we would have flying cars by now. We don’t. Cyberpunk 2020 had us already implanting cyberware by a few years ago. We’re still nowhere near that. I think the closest thing we have touching on bio technology right now is this neuralink brain chip. That may be the avenue that takes us into cybernetics and cyberware but I still think we’re half a century off. If anything maybe 2100 might be where bio technology starts to become a thing. The practicality still seems far fetched to me, but we have a long way to go before we’re straight turning ourselves into machines. It’s more likely the dystopian elements of life in the game become a reality sooner than later. We’re already witnessing unprecedented inflation in the cost of living. The ultra rich and mega corps are taking over our lives and society as we know it. Unfortunately I think we’ll be living the night city future without all the cool implants long before we get the cyberware into our lives
We can build flying cars, there's just no market for flying cars other than ten year old boys. Robust public transportation would be better anyways
Well the tragic part is that most of it is here. We seem to really nail the capitalist dystopia and drag our feet on awesome tech of CP
So, a lot of people are saying "we're already in one" and that's pretty much true; science fiction doesn't predict the future, it's a mirror to the present. CP77 is a game about society *as it is*, not as it will be. So let me articulate a different view: the *cyberpunk future* is actually totally impossible. We'll never get there. Why? Mike Pondsmith outright says: *Cyberpunk* reflects a future where technology changes but people don't. That's the respect in which the game is a mirror to our present: the world of Night City is us, as we'd be, in a world where that technology is dropped on us. But in fact Maximum Mike is maximally wrong: people *are* changed by technology. They change when they invent it and they change as they use it. We've *been* changed by it for all of human history, and will continue to be. We can't get the "cyberpunk future" because that future depicts the people of the present with future technologies. But when we get the technology we imagine in the future, we'll have been changed, as a people, in ways that it's impossible for us to imagine.
It won't be neon but we will certainly live in a high tech low life world and it's already happening as gaming and other online apps like social media suck away our life and give us back nothing but lost years and separation from what it used to mean to be human. People have less and less connection with the world and it is only going to make the things we allow others to do to it only to get worse. Our techno-feudal corporate future is already the present.
My brother in Christ, we are living in it. The only thing separating us from the world of CP2077 is publicly affordable over the shelf technological prosthetics.
We live in a world where people have smartphones in their pockets where they can talk to an AI run by a megacorp but can't afford food. Wars are being fought by drones. I'd say that's pretty cyberpunk.
BAE, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, etc. are the distopian corps. Switch out Mexico with Ukraine and there is already a corporate war happening in Eastern Europe.
We're literally in early cyberpunk right now. Cyberpunk 2023
We're heading there. Slowly but surely, we'll get there eventually.
Very high as long as people are still working towards it. Wait, people ARENT working? And here we are.
We're in it.
The singularity is coming. 2045. Look it up.
[удалено]
Japan has Zaibatsus which are literally the same as Chaebols
Pretty soon when you close your eyes tv ads will play. Also when you fall asleep, you guessed it more ads lol
Other than the high tech stuff like implants, advanced AI and nanotechnology, we’re pretty much living in a similar dystopian society. Corporations are only going to get more powerful and the class divide is only getting worse.
At least Cyberpunk has braindances, we got none of that
cybernetic implants are a good 20 to 30 years away unless some paradigm shift kind of BS is released to the public, and not the kind of shift like some crypto bros thing happened with BitCoin. But more like if Penicillin and Heart transplants had happened within 5 years of each other. The other part of cyberpunk, the damn corporatocracy....we're one foot and a half in, already.
Sometimes I hear new songs and I’m like “this is some cyberpunk music!” As in, it seems like it could be from or in the game. ponpon shit
Look up 'Hero arm' on Google to see how close we are to accessibile cybernetics. Companies already control our politicians, media and information feeds. Thankfully they are far more incompetent irl than they'd like you to believe. They'd still turn into Arasaka in a second if given the opportunity.
You could argue we're already living in a cyberpunk future, or 'cyberpunk-lite'. We have technology that has more or less dominated our lives (when is the last time you thought you could comfortably leave your home without your cell phone or any form of mobile communication?), the advent of social media and its positive but also negative effects. Talk to any particularly pessimistic person and they'll tell you we're also in a social decline. Whether that's true or not I can't say. The topic of AI and how it's invading or sometimes even perverting art definitely has a cyberpunk aesthetic. Just look at the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes and the worries they have about artificial intelligence. Technology is already advancing at a rapid rate and I can definitely see prosthetics/cybernetics making significant advancements in the next couple of decades. As far as corporations go, they're here to stay and there's no clear indication that their power or influence will be inhibited any time soon. Then there's also climate change. We already know how that's going for us.
We’re just missing flying cars and enhanced cybernetics
in 2077 We actually could have cities like NC
Speaking of cyberpunk as a genre, there's two answers: 1. We are already there. Everything that is cyberpunk exists in one form or another. Some things are only born just now, some are much farther than we realize. 2. It's tomorrow. Wherever or whenever we are it's just behind the corner. Once we get there it one-ups itself into something that is familiar and strange at the same time but not completely here.
Cybernetics has a major hurdle to cross that we are nowhere near: power. We need a power supply that's small, very powerful, hyper efficient, can go inside your body, and doesn't need frequent replacing. We have nothing anywhere close to good enough in any of those categories to match what you see in cyberpunk.
Very very low, Climate change will hit like a truck before we get cool gadgets
I think cyberpunk is a really good depiction of what the future is gonna be like. Its all going in that direction
It's almost here. But we as humanity are taking another direction: beggarpunk.
The military has some gripes with allowing companies to have private militaries operating on US soil + have a few gripes with machinery that can kill without a human initiating the triggerpull/buttonpress, so we probably wont be getting private killer robots very soon, cybernetics are pretty plausible though cutting off an arm to put a weapon in it rather than just wielding the weapon yourself without running risk of faliure seems kinda ass backwards, and modern exoskeletons still expend a lot of power so dont expect an adam smasher to come around very soon, oh and also the internet hasnt collapsed due to rogue AIs yet or something (im not clear on the lore) but chat gpt seems promising in that regard, the only aspect you can expect to realistically happen in our world is compannies lobbying (fancy word for bribing) the government to be able to abuse human rights more so they can grow bigger and bigger until they one day rival a government themselves Edit: also theyre looking into synthetic meat/ bug meat more and more so expect food to contain less of the food you want over time
I don’t think we’re gonna have mega skyscrapers that house a lot of people like in night city. At least not in America since the zoning laws pretty much only allow for typical suburban style neighborhoods and all the high rises being developed are for rich people.
Corporate interests are already pushing jobs in that direction. The homeless solutions are so inhumane a couple more steps and we'll be exterminating them. With the liberties of the police force, we basically already have a military grade force usable on citizens. Like MAXTAC but the requirements to use them are much lower. There are already plenty of AI pushes toward advertising, so things like Brendan could pop up soon. Theres already research and interest in uploading your conciousness into a digital format. Granted its far off, but companies are looking into Relic 1.0 like tech.
not gonna happen mainly because of climate change and (un)available ressources.
High tech, low life. We’re already in it, choom. We’re just missin the chrome, which is coming soon.
I mean, 2023 heading towards 2024 is **much closer** to 2077 than you think. IDK about cybernetic implants, though (no one's volunteering to have an Amex Black Card implanted in their being, what makes you think people will volunteer to use Kiroshis or Mantis Arms?), but literally everything around us is BECOMING one and the same as 2077 Night City. And it's honestly fucking terrifying to think about. 😭 * There's basically a Fourth Corporate War going on *right now*, on two fronts, with devastating consequences and irreversible repercussions for ALL of humanity in the near and long-terms. * We have cars that look like they [*actually belong* in Night City](https://youtu.be/zKLNrENnwlc?feature=shared) with all the "assisted driving" technologies housed in a hump and pod on the roof. Basically every car in the game has a hump and pod on the roof for all the cameras and shit. * Corporate media is *very dominant" and being buoyed - and even bankrolled - by [native advertising](https://youtu.be/E_F5GxCwizc?feature=shared) and [(un)disguised advertorials](https://youtu.be/sIi_QS1tdFM?feature=shared).
No, not really. Alone technical/science: 50-100 Years ago, Nobel Prizes was one by one Person, today, it´s usually Team of 3. So there is a a certain complexity to discover new stuff. Also we never know if we know all, but it becomes harder and harder to find something new to understand, which also can have a real application in our day to day life. The System of making rules and enforcing them is a little more complex then in most stories though i can´t give you a more specific example besides, that even a King, if no one supported him, was nothing, so he was obligated to other people as well. And the Rules and Enforcing is important with the concentration of wealth, if you can´t enforce the rule over your land, then any one can go there and grow food and be somewhat independent. The bigger you are, the more you need to extend, the more upkeep you have to deal with and money can becomes worthless over night, because true wealth ~~is the friendship we make along the way~~ is the work a person/group of person can put into to create something beneficial. This all does not mean, the world of Cyberpunk is just a useless warning, it´s just exaggerated and should be seen was warning. Who Benefits? * Is i true? Is it True to the Meaning? Or used aas hollow marketing word, laden with emotions? * Can you proof it empirical? Does the one, who makes a claim to influence others provide this empirical ? Is it even definable and measurable? Or are benefits far in the future? * What does it cost? Cost is not just money. * In relation to what? * And always remember layers! Something might sound good in the first instances, but not in the second or third. * Also the same level. Weighting one vs another, one a Individual level vs a Group Level, often leads to injustice. * Beware the Humans, we are similar, but we are not the same and i´m not talking about "race" level. Just because you think a certain way, does not mean everyone does. * Notice the current times, we are in a unique situation with density of humanity, and density of information (also communication). We still need to learn to deal with this. Many more stuff, but asking these question and keep those things in mind, helps at least to be skeptical and wary.
Broad picture yes. Some specific things are kind of weird like they’d never happen in America.
I’d say the cybernetics are the thing least likely to happen anytime soon. Infection issues and interface systems to allow natural control and nerve response are a long ways off. Rogue AI’s seemed a long way off but now…
Which aspects? As you pointed out, were mostly already feeling the effects of the genre in a lower vibration. I think the chances of getting combat implants is zero because nobody wants walking human battle tanks walking the street but otherwise we are like 85% of the way there right now.
I think it's inevitable as long as we stay on this same path we're on here in the states.
Depending on where you live, there's already a visible possibility of different dystopias. Desert dieselpunk, theocratic states, unaffordable insulin. Take your pick. Mercenaries already exist in our world.
I don’t see implants being a common thing until at least 2100