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Originally Posted by Reese
To fix a typo in that quote, there are 212 countries, not 112.
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Oh, I just assumed that many microstates had merged...
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Originally Posted by Reese
If something's illegal, There's always going to be a black market for it. Security is pretty tight though. There are scanners on every corner in cities and an untagged robot can't cross the street without being picked up and sent to the pound. The people that do have ultra reals don't let them go far outdoors because they'll get arrested. If you get out into more rural areas where scanners are more of a rarity you might see an ultra-real on the street, assuming you can tell the difference. It should be noted that each individual function of an android is legal. It doesn't get illegal until you start combining a unit that looks like, thinks like and sounds like a human.
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It's not really the android frames that interest me so much as the abstract AI software "life forms". The going theory among current thinkers is that once software and hardware develops to the point it will be possible to entirely model human brain activity, beyond that human evolution is utterly unforeseeable. Some people are excited about that, and some are terrified.
The thought of a future where such an eventuality is explicitly
and legally precluded opens all sorts of possibilities. It's pretty well impossible to legislate the Singularity away, but you could isolate its effects to certain labs and underground markets. The super-human (sometimes referred to as "weakly godlike") AI would then have to start manipulating humanity for their own ends through other means--corporate, market-driven, and political, most likely. I mean, how can you ban a superior life form?