Ooooh man, this thread makes me excited. I've been thinking about this for a month or two now. Thank you for creating this!
I see my neighborhood(s) (tbh I'm stuck between two of them - might combine Fort Osceola with Sycamore Grove as the downtown since I'm fond of both of them) as being somewhat in the future, maybe by 50 years, and pretty far along both technologically and societally speaking. The only reason for this is so I have some reasoning as to why Servos have the position they have in my game.
Keep in mind, I've been working on these neighborhoods on and off for the past year or so, and I still haven't finalized everything to the point where I'm playing regularly, but I can try and cement some ideas that came to me after playing in smaller, lower-impact 'hoods. So, a company is going to be the primary inventors of the Servo, but probably the government intervened when they tried to patent the invention, claiming that AI intelligence has some baseline level of morality and ethics that you can't infringe upon or something. Blah blah, I'm not a lawyer.
So I can see there being maybe two primary Servo-building companies with hella beef between one another, one being the ones who invented them 50 years ago, and the other being the ones who strived above all the other copycats. Maybe one crappy company that has a much lower production rate, with a higher rate of malfunction. And probably those two very large companies who create Servos would have mass-production plans in place for all the other things you can build with the robotics station.
Personally, I find the Servos to be very visually displeasing, on a basic level and also when consideration is given to the fact that I don't want 5,000 clones running around jumping in pee puddles and fighting witches. Or whatever they do. *shrug* So I prefer to give my Servos Sim-like appearances, using the tutorials you can find online. I have yet to figure out how to distinguish them from their human counterparts, as I find the android skins kind of disconcerting, but I'll figure it out. Maybe some cyberpunk make-up would do the trick... Hm, I'm not sure. I'll have to give it some more thought.
But, so, I consider Servos to be sentient beings on their own, not just robotic slaves, as... that in itself is pretty disconcerting as well. So they have their own positions in society. They can get married to each other or other Sims, adopt children (I'll have to consider if they will be able to have children on their own - there was some article I saw a few months back which actually discussed powering robots through chemical/biological processes... So that gets me thinking that the line between human/robot could certainly be blurred.), and live just like other Sims. But they don't get brought into the world or activated (I can see potential for a political storm in my neighborhoods' government over the robots' rights. Do they still have rights if they're not activated? How do you know they don't sit there in some limbo between existence and lack of it? Oooh I like it.) unless a client/customer orders/purchases one from the companies. I can very easily see one political party trying to fight for regulation of Servo sales, to make it an order-only purchase in order to prevent weird robotic spiritual limbo, and another fighting for the company's rights to turn a profit (it doesn't sound very economical for the company to wait around twiddling their thumbs for some orders before they can actually start production, right?), or perhaps just the companies themselves would be fighting the government on that. Maybe there will be a government-mandated restriction on how many Servos each company can create per annum, perhaps in an attempt to make sure the Servo to Sim ratio does not grow out of proportion.
The way Servos come into society is that they must first be placed through schooling. I never liked the idea in sci-fi movies that robots just woke up all-knowing without any need of conditioning or training for the world they've been brought into. I mean, look at Jurassic Park. Them there dinos are similar in concept to bringing a robot to life, and they didn't really go through much conditioning as they were more of a show-and-tell thing than an actual societal benefit. *shrug* So, I figure the Servos will have to go through some conditioning of sorts. I don't know if you can age down a Servo into a toddler/child... Sounds like it'd be sort of game-breaking, but given how the appearance tutorials work, like, it's not
that much of a stretch. Would love some confirmation on this though before I explode my game. My heart is very set on having Servos that age up through time, as in the novel I'm toying with involves a couple of first-gen sentient robots that have to come to grips with what and who they really are as they grow up. It's really weird in theory, but I like it. It's got lots of possibilities for interesting plot points.
So Servos are ordered or purchased by a Sim or family, once they meet a specific list of requirements set forth by the government (depending on who's in control of it - yeah, who, as in many people, but not many people as in a political party. Screw that, bro, I get enough headaches from the mere concept of political parties in real life. This is my utopia, and in my utopia, political parties never existed. Nope. Bye. Donezo.). The Servos... hmm.. Well, depending on the system that ends up being in place, either by my own volition or by how my game's government ends up playing with it, they will either A.) Be mass-manufactured and placed in special schooling programs regulated by the government and the companies in order to best ensure their growth as individuals, then after X amount of years (maybe they grow faster than humans? But I just watched the film Morgan, so that sounds like a trip to nopesville), a family adopts them. Or, B.) The family adopts them before their own creation, and then waits X amount of years for the Servo to be deemed educated enough to go out into society. But then I can see a lot of Sims who are infertile getting upset because then they're at the disadvantage - they can't have their own kids, but then they have to wait however long to actually get theirs? While their friends' kids are already getting on in their lives? *shrug* If you couldn't tell, I like seeing how I can set things up for interesting conflicts.
The Servos get adopted, and live with their families, but then what do they do once they're around the "age" that you'd consider them to be an adult? Well, like I said before, they can move on with their lives just like any other Sim their age would. They can get married, adopt kids, pursue careers, or perhaps they are determined to provide the best life possible for their family - just like human beings and/or Sims do. However, I do believe they will be an integral part of the neighborhoods' economy, seeing as their motives are less restrictive than Sims', and that allows them to work more efficiently in the farms and production lines. So, basically, it's automation, except it's still got the emotion to it. It's not strictly Sims here and Servos over there. No, they're connected. Sims can have Servo children, or maybe there's a Servo with a Sim for a wife and a Servo daughter and a Sim son. Or maybe there's two Servos who have several children of their own, be it adopted Sims or they figured out a way to make the science work so they could get pregnant, or just decided to adopt a Servo themselves (maybe adopting Servos would be cheaper than actually impregnating one with another, causing it to be less common for Servo-Servo created children - assuming this concept even works when put into action, that is).
And then... you have this massive population of un-aging robots, and what do you do with them? Well, I'd like to imagine there's some sort of hard-coded bit inside of them that says that can't exceed a certain number of years lived, let's say 100. Maybe some of them have special ceremonies, maybe some of them wait for the last few minutes in total silence. But I'd force them into death regardless. A quick google search tells me they can die from the flu, so I could probably use that as a way to pretend they got ill towards the end of their lives. All the other ways seem far too morbid for my tastes, though perhaps maybe some particularly daring space-pioneering Servos would smile at the thought of dying in a fire aboard a ship that was hurtling towards knowledge and progress. It's kinda poetic, really.
*wheeze*
I think I got too excited.
Also I think I have a stomach bug or something, so I may be kind of loopy from a lack of being able to consume anything without ejecting it from my system for the past week or so. Sorry if it makes no coherent sense!
"God created dinosaurs. God destroyed dinosaurs. God created Man. Man destroyed God. Man created dinosaurs.
Dinosaurs eat man...Woman inherits the earth."
- Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park
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