If I was a gambler, I’d bet that part of this contract to the potential recruits to this programme, is that they are indentured until the cost of their clone “rejuvenation” is “paid off”.
Probably every time their clone is killed in an explosion of the installation they’re employed on, additional costs are applied to their contract, thus extending the length of time they’re indentured before they have “paid back” the cost of their rejuvenation, and can “go home”.
But gambling is a sin.
The only thing I can think of offhand, is that somehow they have figured out how to reduce the psychosis rate of the ex-nihilo clones produced by the Takmahl Mass Cloning Device.
You’d also have hard time getting someone to take that bet, given how obvious the scheme is.
Oh yes, of course.
It does of course also mean that the various polities that Upwell has apparently pitched this scheme at - the State, Republic, Empire, and Federation, will also be left wondering when the “costs” will be paid off and they will start seeing a return on allowing their citizens to be recruited to this… thing…
I’m normally uninterested in blame, Elsebeth. It tends to interfere with understanding.
“Blame the merchant, not the customer” (or, I suspect, product) seems a little hollow when it’s precisely a merchant’s role to identify demand and provide products to serve it.
In this case, new lives-- and new staffing solutions.
These wars of ours have been chewing through those generational cycles you seem so fond of. It’s typically the young who die in war, at least to start with (and as long as it’s not being fought through the middles of people’s homes).
Well … it may be the elderly now get a chance to throw their lives away, also. I wonder if they’ll be restorable from backup archives; if that, or something similar, is the way of it they may even be difficult to exhaust as a resource.
So maybe my crews will be able to get flash-fried to bulkheads repeatedly. Yaaay.
But if that’s something they’d rather have than just dying once and being lost forever. . . .
A different world, for sure.
You do not seem to disagree with me on my point, Aria Jenneth; you only find it distasteful that I delivered it.
I do not think me continuing this discussion further will be beneficial to any sane cause.
It’s what I said before, Elsebeth: we’re not good critics here.
We aren’t, not just you. We, abundantly gifted with life upon life upon life. Abomination or not, we accepted it-- benefitted from it.
For us to twist our lips now in disgust feels …
“Gross.”
I’m sorry. Are they really proposing genetic slavery here? Because if so I have opinions.
People are probably going to have opinions whatever the terms are, and really a lot of the options are likely to run close to indentured servitude-- after all, how else does a company guard its interests when primary payment is a new body, and that benefit is rendered right up front? At that point revoking the contract and reclaiming the clone is likely to result in death. Cloning to date is universally one-way; even jump clones aren’t really the same body we’re returning to again and again, just easy circumstances for keeping our implant sets intact for installation in the next clone. So it’s not like they’ll be able to go back to their old bodies.
Anyway, however efficient the process it seems unlikely that they’re mostly trying to attract those who can pay for it out of pocket. So it’s looking like the workers are essentially the product here, which implies they’re a good whose services can be readily guaranteed.
So, yeah, it’s probably going to be something like a period of indenture. If Upwell is being kind they probably won’t be penalized for, like, dying and needing another new body.
If not, well. . . .
People might accept some pretty unfavorable terms if it means they get to keep living.
(I can’t really see it being so harsh as permanent enslavement though. People might not rush to sign up for that kind of life, even if they get to live indefinitely.)
So let’s be clear here: what Upwell is offering is something that has been standard for the rich for decades. There doesn’t seem to be anything new here beyond simply expanding how many people have access to it.
And while I certainly have questions about if they’re intending to use this to exploit people unfairly, which does seem like a thing that is likely, ultimately, providing better equality of access to medical treatments is a very good thing.
The only thing new here is how available it is implied to be. And the only thing gross here is that it’s in corporate hands.
With great respect, ma’am, the ad implies not only a new life, but a new future-- one “you have chosen,” but with strong implications that it’s somewhere … up here. It’s being offered as part of a package of some kind. Given some of the other materials cited above it looks like they’re thinking in terms of structure staffing.
It’s not just medical advancement; there’s more to this. I’m not prepared to say that corporate hands are necessarily more uncaring than others (the Caldari State megacorps, for example, are less about money and more about rulership), but Upwell’s work does tend in some very particular directions.
It’s grand work, no doubt. But, historically kind of pitiless.
I guess we’ll see where they really mean to take it this time.
I guess having it as a package is new, but it didn’t sound to me like you guys were talking as much about that as about the cloning part. Maybe I was misunderstanding your meaning, though. Which … well, alright, but honestly that sounds to me like they’re taking payment for the cloning by using you as a worker and trying to spin it that them using you as a worker is them doing you a favor. That sort of marketing is nothing new.
So, sure, I guess the specific combination of how they’re packaging stuff is new, but I still don’t see any great innovation here, really.
The reason this has so far been available only for the rich (or the capsuleer, which after some time amounts to the same thing) is that cloning done right is (at least for now) not only a questionable practice, but an expensive questionable practice. The expense comes from many sources, but two big ones are 1) crafting the clone to be genetically and spiritually suitable for the person to inhabit it, and 2) maintaining, staffing, and keeping secure the medical / jump cloning bays and infomorph storage.
We do not know Upwell’s way around this yet, but barring a major breakthrough in both of those and some other things, they intend to cut the costs somehow if they are going for mass production.
Notably, the advertisement seems to show standardized bodies, with little tailoring involved to make sure the mind, spirit and body are in fact aligned. While there are already examples of extensive modifications to baseline bodies, these are generally chosen by the individual for their subjective needs, not mass-produced. And even then, they are not always occupied by the stablest of individuals.
I would also be concerned about the control of the cloning bays and infomorph copies (if any) of this kind of a mass produced storage. That is a major point of vulnerability for the supposedly immortal capsuleer population, and those of us with brains in their heads tend to have trusted people vetting this part of the process. I am sure I do not need to feed the audience any more ideas than they already have about how to use this for population control in a mass-production context.
An expensive process, yes, but calling it a questionable one is … well, it sure is something.
I’ll give you the fact that the way some of the supply of bodies for it is obtained is certainly questionable, but that’s not inherent to the process.
Of course, medical treatment that is only easily available to the rich is questionable in that aspect, but this is hinting at it being made more widely available, so … less questionable, I guess?
But it is true we do not know Upwell’s solution to the problems causing the expense, of course, if they even have one or simply think they can profit even with existing costs somehow (though I do doubt that, it does seem likely they have some way of cutting costs, be it revolutionary or not).
It is a bit curious that the advertisement shows standardized bodies, I suppose that might appeal to some but does seem less likely to have mass appeal except for the desperate, so I am curious if this is some requirement of the technology and they were being uncharacteristically honest, or if it was some odd artistic choice on their part, or what.
I can attest from personal experience that living in a body that does not match one’s feeling of what one’s body should be is a very uncomfortable experience for most people, which as mentioned non-desperate people would probably be unlikely to willingly choose, of course, corporations preying upon the desperate is nothing new. But many people learn to live with many things, of course, and different aspects of how one’s body is can be more or less important to different people. So we shall see, I suppose.
Your comment about bodymodding is misleading, though. Overwhelmingly, bodymodding as a means of self-expression in nearly all forms – of which cloning can serve as one – assists in making people feel more comfortable with their bodies or able to properly express their identity or inner selves, and thus provides a source of stability.
Indeed.
Ok, but if what you’re actually upset about is ways in which corporations are bastards, talk about that instead of casting aspersions on a life-saving medical technology.
Well, why not both.
Well, I guess we can agree on one and disagree on the other.
That said, well … that still means we disagree on something rather fundamental to me, so I don’t think this is likely to make us friends.
With respect, ma’am, the cloning process can be criticized from a few perspectives.
Leaving aside the wealth of the cloned, there’s what it’s mostly been used for: warfare, preserving weapon-trained infomorphs, guiding intelligences for weaponry from infantry to supercapitals, while allowing those same infomorphs to deploy in ways that would otherwise be terribly reckless. The result has been so much mass death that almost any experienced capsuleer is functionally a psychopomp, shipping souls off to the next world by the literal boatload.
Then there’s the effect on the cloned mind, which I think is kind of central to Elsebeth’s concerns. The copying process isn’t quite perfect: there’s a little erosion each time, little enough (these days) to be barely noticeable, but enough to make the “true” identity of the cloned entity a little questionable. (I don’t personally find this very troublesome although I’ve cloned probably hundreds of times by now, but it’s still an argument that can be made.) The true effects remain a little obscured, although, considering how important the capsuleer class has become, even if some major issue that would inevitably result in our total psychological disintegration over time were proved (“capsuleer dementia” or similar) it’s quite possible we wouldn’t be told.
Then there’s the spiritual question. The Amarr seem to have made their peace with cloning as a practice, mostly, the godflesh doctrine aside, but I’m not even sure what Elsebeth means about making a clone “spiritually suitable” and if each of my “selves” has its own soul because the universe regards each as a different person there’s probably a whole district of just copies of me in the next world by now, some of which lived for only a few minutes. I tend to believe that if actual, spiritual souls are an actual thing that they probably accompany the infomorph rather than the body, but not everyone thinks that way. For many, a stopped heart and flatlined brain is a death, whether the mind finds a new bit of hardware to run it or not.
Am I forgetting anything big, Elsebeth? I mean there’s the whole thing about being made out of cadavers (and my predecessor’s, I gather, had to resort to child cadavers to get bones the right size) but that’s a decade-plus out of date by now.
People generally make the mistake of thinking body, mind, and spirit are separate entities. While they can be separated - or at least the body can be separated from the rest - the mind is not independent from the body it was grown in, and the body is not unaffected by what goes on in the mind. The body is not a tool of the mind and spirit. They are one and the same. Mind is a quality of matter, not a separate phenomenon from it.
If a body does not conform well enough to the mind and spirit transferred to it, both body and mind are changed. In the case where the mind chooses the new body to suit its spiritual needs, the change can be harmless, or even beneficial. But in a case where someone is transported to a body incapable of supporting he mind and spirit in full, the effect is detrimental, and can be disastrous.
This much is, as I understand it, factual and true in the scientific sense.
Personally, I also believe that we have a spiritual duty to preserve the original mind/spirit/body connection as intact as possible, even through repeated clonings as we best can, and that our true self is neither our mind nor our spirit, but the combination of the three.