competition in transhumanist futures

💁‍♀️😩

Yesterday, while talking about feats that might or might not someday be seen in speedrunning, I wrote:

Whether we get to observe “eventually” is a little up in the air, since I don’t actually know for certain how long we have until society is fundamentally transformed in some way, whether it’s for the better or for the worse.

Now, the “for the worse” case is fairly obvious—civilizational collapse will not be good for the poor speedrunning community. But why would a transformation for the better be a problem?

Well, suppose it’s The Future, and now everyone eats special Nanobot Slop. A serving of Nanobot Slop appears at a glance to be very similar to any of your favorite foods offered by modern Earth, except perhaps appreciably improved in some ways. The consumption experience is the same. But the eponymous nanobots of the Nanobot Slop, rather than being absorbed by your body the way most food might, rearrange in your stomach to output precisely those chemicals your body needs at the moment, whatever they might be. The vast majority of people end up simply experiencing a world of morphological freedom, where they can lose weight or gain muscle simply by noting their intention to do so in the Nanobot Slop App on their handheld mobile iPhone device.

How does one write sports regulations for this?

I suppose you probably could figure something out. It wouldn't be that hard to add some sort of “no steroids” feature. And I am taken to understand that renowned science fiction author Iain M. Banks wrote a book, Player of Games, wherein drugs glands and the presence of superintelligent Minds did for some reason not interfere with the playing of games. Nonetheless, seems a little tricksy.

And really, like, this is the baby stuff. People have already started being able to control video games with their minds; this is a technology that currently exists. Suppose that it someday becomes the ubiquitous method of playing video games. Long gone are the days of controllers—you simply imagine the actions you wish for your character to perform. Even for older video games, it is much more common to hook up a simulated controller to a brain-computer interface than to actually play the game using anything remotely resembling the original hardware. What’s the plan for that? If I imagine spamming a button at precisely 30 Hz am I allowed to do that? What if I just imagine a TAS route in my head. This is clearly untenable.

Perhaps those dedicated competitive gamers will all track down vintage video gaming hardware that still supports physical controllers. This might make some sense. But how many centuries would such a practice really hold up for, if everyone is elsewise gaming on their new-fangled imagination macro setup?

This all isn't to say that I know there will immediately be some insurmountable crisis of rulesets within the foreseeable future. It's just, once we start getting to the unforseeable parts, the part of my brain that scans for exceptions and edge cases and beaches with very shallow lines at best and other assorted ruleset disasters lights up and says I have no truly solid idea what it will even be like to play a video game in half a century or three.