BosWash's correctional system is practically unrecognizably alien to someone born in the twentieth century.
Cause and effect is, as ever, hard to trace; but my best guess is that around the time all the anti-oligarchical measures were being taken, one of the more significant ones was replacing the old first-past-the-post election systems with ideas more advanced than those from the 1700s, ranging from simple ranked ballots to full-fledged computer-mediated liquid democracy. Which changed the incentives of people running for office to stop being so polarized, which allowed for useful amounts of policy now being based on evidence and harm-reduction. Which all added up to BosWash's jails seeming, to me, to be on the Scandinavian model, only moreso.
According to my pre-trial reading, then my 'cell' would be a dorm room, which was actually larger than the near-closet I parked Lexx the RV-maid-bot in... and I could walk out of it whenever I wanted. I could, in fact, wander the city pretty much at will, as long as some online forms I had to file in advance were approved, and I was back by curfew; and at every moment, at least three government-run surveillance drones would watch my every move. Not to mention that one of the government-run augmented-reality layers included notices to anyone who cared that a non-violent prisoner would be at such-and-such a place at such-and-such a time. Rather to my astonishment, I would even be allowed to keep the sedative injector in my tailtip - as best as I could dig up, the reasoning being that just because the state was restricting certain of my liberties did not remove my right to self-defence. The prison staff themselves were almost entirely unarmed.
Outside of those limitations on my movement, then as long as I didn't do anything that would justify more significant limitations on my liberties - there were, in fact, a few "real" prisons for people judged to be dangers to others - the main upshot of the relevant incarceration program was a mandatory version of the self-improvement program I'd already been working on: education, training, counselling, socialization events, employment if I wished it. By the end of my thirty days, I was supposed to be ready to face the world.
Naturally, the original plan was derailed on the very first day; specifically, during the mandatory medical check-up. (Yes, even robotic people are covered under The Future's health system, for both physical and mental ailments.)
Picture this: in a hospital room, a blue rat's skeleton is sitting on an exam table, calmly threatening to suicide if the nearly human, if rather multicoloured, robo-specialist brings a replacement part any closer, until a perfectly ordinary-looking teddy bear - brown fur and red bow-tie - walks into the room, saying, "I'll take over for now, Judy," and waving her out
There's a reason I titled my journal 'Living in Weirdtopia'.
"Suicide negotiater?" I hazarded a guess.
"Less often than you'd think," the teddy answered, pulling itself up onto one of the human-scale chairs. "Doctor Ramirez, psychiatrist, psychologist, licensed therapist, and general dogsbody. Do you /want/ to kill yourself?"
"Nope."
"Good. Well, that's the negotiating part of my job done. How about some therapy? I'm very good at cuddling."
"... I currently have a certain lack of trust in doctor-patient confidentiality. I may have tried to hold myself hostage to express how strongly I feel about a particular issue, but you've had decades to figure out how to get around simple plans like that. For all I know, you've got some sort of electromagnetic pulse generator in your stuffing that would knock me offline long enough for you to perform the repairs that you feel medically justified in imposing against my will."
"If we could do that, then couldn't we already have one of those things under the bed?"
"Possible, but at least a little less likely than just having one somewhere on-site to grab when you need it."
"Fair enough. I can unzip myself and empty out all my stuffing, if you'd care to inspect me. Technically, it's part of my legal body, but because I deal with a lot of sniffling and dirty children, I was able to get a few variances, so I could launder myself and such. Body-change exemptions for the social good were easier to get back then."
"... I appreciate the offer, but I don't know that I'd be able to recognize all the possible incapacitating gadgets that could have been invented, so there's not much point. How about we just talk a bit?"
"That's what I'm here for. What would you like to talk about?"
"... I apologize if this is insulting, but I'm offline at the moment - which pronouns do you prefer I use for you?"
"Whichever you wish. Male works, if you don't have a preference. I'm nonbinary - specficially, deergender."
"... I'm going to admit that I have no idea what that means."
"Very little, given that we are in something resembling a formal, if not necessarily doctor-patient relationship, which means that any relationship in which my sex, gender, or orientation matters is prohibited by my professional ethics."
"Fair enough. ... I'm sorry for dragging you into this, but I've been having a difficult week, and I'm having to adapt a lot of my plans on the fly. I'd really like to serve my sentence and get back to my life, without any complications. Except, well, there's a complication."
"The correctional system's goals are something along the lines of releasing you into the public, in the best state possible to become a productive member of society. Complications tend to be why people enter into the system in the first place. Why don't you tell me more about it?"
"I would have guessed you already know, given that you're probably online, and have access to all sorts of software that's analyzed my every word and action."
"There's still a difference between what can be estimated from such data, and what any individual's personal experience may feel like. The more you tell me, the more likely I can figure out whether your objections are the product of a conscientious, principled stand, or whether you have some form of mental damage that is preventing you from thinking clearly, or whether something else is going on. There are a number of tests that could be run to rule out any form of emulated organic damage - but I can see you tensing up at that."
"I appreciate you taking the time here, but I'm having to double-check my replies, because I'm not sure whether doctor-patient confidentiality applies - or, even if it did, whether you could actually provide any believable assurances that you /could/ ensure that a nominally private discussion remained, in fact, private. I freely admit that if I was suffering one of any number of mental disorders, I would be the last one to be able to recognize them; but even if something went wrong with my upload procedure and the digital file of my brain got corrupted and turned me psychopathic, the concerns I have with trust still seem, to me, to be entirely reasonable and justified, and the best choice I think I can make is to act as if they /are/ reasonable and justified, if not entirely so."
"Do you /think/ you are psychopathic?"
"Not really. I can make myself feel arbitrarily sad by letting myself think for some length of time about everyone I knew who's now dead, which is, well, pretty much everyone I knew. Even just thinking about my cat, who died before I did, is enough to make my chest ache in ways that are physiologically impossible with this robotic body."
"Have you thought about contacting any currently living relatives?"
"Doc - after more than a couple of generations with no contact, direct relatives are hard to distinguish from anyone else. Heck, I'm President Eisenhower's tenth cousin thrice removed, among more distant famous relations, but that doesn't mean I should show up at any of their family reunions. And that's not even getting into the fact that it's hard for me to claim I'm a blood relative of /anyone/, just now, given my lack of, you know, blood, or any other carrier of DNA."
"Some people might worry that, without a solid connections with more of humanity, then even if you start out sane, you'll develop some issues."
"You've got trolls who can affect the physical world anonymously. Even if I did think my nearest living cousin was someone I wanted to develop a relationship with, I hardly think bringing him or her to the attention of said trolls would be doing him or her any favours. I'd like to think I'm not the sort of person who deliberately makes other peoples' lives worse just to make my own better in some way, or to accomplish some trifling goal."
"What about a non-trifling goal?"
"It's always possible to come up with some lifeboat scenario or trolley problem, which is so far from regular life that the usual rules-of-thumb of morality lead to inconsistent or disturbing results. That doesn't mean that odd behaviour in such extremes can be extrapolated back to odd behaviour in the everyday."
"Did that sound a bit defensive to you when you said it?"
"I'm trying to be cooperative, in the hopes that we'll get back around to the main point, so you can declare me 'annoying but sane', and I can fill out whatever forms you've got in place for people with Jehovah's Witness style objections to particular undesired medical interventions, so I can get back to working towards my various goals myself instead of having to delete myself and hoping that Junior can work towards them in my stead. I'm trying to anticipate the direction of where you seem to be taking the conversation, and head off some items in advance so we can save a bit of time; naturally, that's going to sound like I'm defending a position you may not have gotten around to yet."
"Are you always this goal-oriented?"
"Probably more than I was before I died, because there are so many more resources available these days for me to try to achieve all sorts of goals; and even more than that, once I realized that there are people who want me dead, not just in the abstract way before I died that there were some people whose religious beliefs led them to the conclusion that the world would be better if a lot of people similar to me weren't in it, but very particularly wanting me in particular to be dead."
"And yet, you have threatened to delete yourself."
"I have goals I hold more important than the version of me you're talking to continuing to be alive. ... Not many, I'll admit."
"Would you be willing to tell me what they are?"
"Sure - I haven't made a secret of them. There are the two biggies, the first being to ensure that at least some version of the pattern of identity that I identify as being my 'self' continues to exist. Which, at the moment, includes myself and Junior, and our inactive backups. If I thought there was any reasonable evidence for a soul, I'd probably be focused on that, instead. The other biggie is ensuring that, other than myself, some form of sapient life continues to exist in the universe, indefinitely. There aren't that many opportunities to affect the odds on that one, but it's still there, and I mention it because it affects edge cases like the lifeboat and trolley problems."
"If those are the 'biggies', are there any goals you have that aren't so big?"
"Oh, of course. To start with, there are the goals that anyone who's seriously trying to accomplish something will share: increasing one's general ability to /accomplish/ goals, such as by controlling more resources to direct to those goals, or having a better understanding of how the universe works, or maintaining one's goal-system in the face of so many attempts of being converted to help other people reach their goals at the expense of your own. And then there's everything from maintaining a reputation for honesty and trustworthiness by keeping promises, to maintaining sanity by spending some time on pursuits that are enjoyable for their own sake and have nothing whatsoever to do with larger goals. ... I was starting to take up the harmonica before I died, but haven't picked one up since. No point."
"No lungs?"
"No lips, either. I know, I could get some electronic variation fabbed up that I could hold to my teeth and pretend to blow through, but it's just not the same. ... I should make a note to find something I /would/ enjoy playing. And somewhere I could practice where my initial feeble efforts wouldn't be plastered all over the current version of YouTube for everyone to point and laugh at. And once I have at least a minimal level of competence, to start using it to feed into that whole 'socialization' thing you've already mentioned would be a good idea."
"I'm glad to hear you're still making plans. Now, this is just an idea, but if you want to skip some of those early steps, why don't you use a program to move your body to play a musical instrument for you?"
"Seems like it would defeat the whole point - might as well just play an MP3 through my speakers. Not to mention the whole set of problems involved in giving any more software any more access to my digital brain."
"'More'? How many other programs have you let access your 'digital brain' already?"
"Doing some anticipation - I've been a properly paranoid prepper. While I expect you have enough access to my search history to know that I've looked into all the software that can tweak my emulated brain in various ways, I've run not a single one of them yet."
"You have a moral objection to altering your mind?"
"Eh, a little from column A. I've always been a teetotaler - but have been willing to take acetaminophen for headaches. I've already undergone one big mental change, being uploaded, and haven't had time to really settle into my new braincase yet. Figuring out how to ethically perform the experiments that would let me determine if any given mind-altering software would have a net positive or negative effect, and to do so in a way that won't get me in too much trouble with society at large - which is an entirely different kettle of fish - is reasonably high on my to-do list, but I've got a lot of other things that need to be worked out first."
What I didn't say aloud, due to my assumption that I had no reason to believe our conversation was private, was that I had noticed a curious trend amongst the intelligence enhancement software I'd been able to find online. In contrast to various speculations during my pre-mortem era that technology could provide ways for people to become smarter, which would lead to better technology that could make people smarter still, leading to an "intelligence explosion" leading to completely unrecognizable forms of life afterwards... nothing of the sort was part of the historical record. Yes, there were various new tricks that let people become "smarter" - but from the ones I'd sampled in depth, they tended to fall into the category of removing some blockage from optimal human biochemistry, or the category of improved pedagogical techniques to make the best use of the available human neural hardware. Put another way, the predicted intelligence exposion had fizzled out at the 'genius human' level - and not even the most clever forms of gamification and incentive-tweaking were able to convince most people to put in the hard work necessary to reach that level, even in whatever field they had the most talent and inclination for.
All of which was reasonably consistent, and at least modestly plausible, given what I'd known before I died, save for one detail. Emulated brains, such as my own, lacked a lot of the limitations of biological ones; anything from increasing the number of neurons in particular areas to running at thousands of times faster than realtime to ignoring Euclidean space should have allowed for all sorts of interesting effects. And yet, the only published results I'd found whose subjects had been remotely sane had also stalled out at the same level of intelligence as people running on wet biochemistry. (And don't even get me started on weirdnesses such as Peggy having human-level intelligence with a brain not much larger than a bird's.)
I'd noticed I was confused. I couldn't see a reason for ems to be limited to the same smarts as bios. Which implied that there was some factor in play I was unaware of. And at least some of the factors which I could imagine which could result in the evidence I'd seen were scarier than well-written creepypastas - and even the more plausible ideas implied that I'd be doing my own health a favour if I kept my various suspicions to myself, and treated 'discretion' less as a virtue and more as a metaphorical gun held to my head. Or something that kept such a metaphorical gun from having its trigger pulled. Something metaphorically dangerous, anyway.
Which is why Junior and I had put together the scheme where he could be placed somewhere outside of public view to start doing things it was best I had no direct knowledge of, though presumably including various quiet forms of investigation and experimentation; while I leveraged the social ritual of a trial to display reasonably strong evidence that I was willing and able to keep secrets in spite of heavy social and legal pressure to share them. Following up on that, in that I was continuing to do the work to keep the secrets I chose to keep despite the cost of doing so including all sorts of annoying complications to my life, was what had led me to be annoying enough to my jailers to have led to my current conversation.
Speaking of which, the talking teddy bear continued, "You just said that doing something ethically is quite different than not getting into trouble. Would you care to elaborate?"
"... Yeah, I can see how that's fairly relevant to the whole correctional institution thing. Alright - a practical example. Back around 2010 AD, signing up cryonics was, in the popular view, about as weird and fringey a thing as anyone could do. Quite literally, less than one in a million people thought that the potential benefits were worth the effort of figuring out the paperwork, the feared potential social costs, and so on. I don't remember the exact numbers - maybe one in two or three million. Given the evidence, it took a very unusual sort of mind to be willing to say, 'Yes, 2,999,999 out of three million of you disagree with me that this is worth doing - but I'm going to do it anyway.' Given that cryonicists were split about evenly between the two main cryo groups, and one was obviously more democratically run than the other; and that a significant portion of cryonicists were theists whose thought processes still assumed the existence of a soul, then in my estimation, it was more like one in ten million people who were able to work through the relevant numbers and to figure out that a low probability of a high reward doesn't imply that the fallacy of a Pascal's Wager was involved. And /this/ whole winnowing process was merely about what most people considered to be a very expensive sort of funeral process, which affected nobody else and offered no measurable potential downsides to society as a whole."
"Many downsides have been argued."
"Maybe by now. Back then, cryo wasn't mainstream enough for such arguments to be very large. Anyway, I'm glad that my cryo wager paid out. And, when I understand a situation well enough to be confident that I have an accurate estimation of the odds, I'm willing to take those odds seriously and put my money where my mouth is, even if everyone in the whole world, barring a scant few fellow travellers, disagrees with me. Figuring out the costs, benefits, and odds, and taking them seriously? That's pretty much the 'doing things ethically' bit. Noticing that I have an option I can take which doesn't harm anyone else, but that I'll be torn limb-from-limb by a mob if I mention aloud I'm seriously considering it? That's more of a practical matter, and is a piece of info to feed into that ethical calculus."
"Some people would call what you just described 'arrogance'."
"I'd use the word 'arrogant' for someone who /inaccurately/ over-valued their own opinion over the crowd's. There are exercises you can do which help you calibrate your estimates. Since, at least in my time, those exercises were nearly unknown, most folks who claimed their opinions were significantly better than the crowd's /were/, most likely, inaccurate and arrogant. ... And, fine, I'll admit that I haven't done nearly enough exercises to be able to honestly claim I'm anywhere near as calibrated as I should be. But I do have at least one significant data point that I'm not as arrogant as strangers might assume me to be."
"Which is?"
"I'm still alive."
"I'll admit, it's an interesting point. And there's no direct rule against being annoying. There are, however, rules against modifying your body without getting the paperwork approved. And one of the punishments for having done so is to not only fill out the missing paperwork, but also a host of other forms even longer than the first set."
"I can live with that."
"I hope you're taking this seriously. When you sign those forms, then you'll be stating that the shape you're in now - with a socket most people would call 'broken' - is what you consider to be 'yourself'. If you're thinking of going back and forth, between having a working socket and a broken one, that's going to be thought of... poorly. How can I explain it... in terms you're familiar with, it might be like someone undergoing years of gender transition, at the taxpayer's expense, and then trying to have them foot the bill to change /back/, too. That's not quite right, but it's the closest parallel I can think of from the era you were born in."
"In case it slipped your mind, I had no choice about the form I'm stuck in - and I'm from a culture that sees this whole 'change your body, get assigned a new identity as an infant' system as foreign and bizarre. There are things I want to do. Being forced into someone else's family for eighteen years is not conducive to those goals - and probably not to my sanity, either. Look up 'schizoid personality disorder, languid subtype' when you have the time. Or whatever the modern term for those symptoms is. Given the clash between my personality and current society, then the most realistic approach may be to deliberately increase the separation between the two; in times past, that might have involved a monastery, or a lighthouse, or a forest-fire watch-tower. These days, maybe it'll involve figuring out how to sign up with whichever space program will take me."
"That may be harder than you think; our digital circuits are even more sensitive to radiation and electromagnetic fields than biological neurons."
"And there are ways to deal with such issues that are known even in my own time, such as running multiple copies in parallel and comparing checksums. But even ignoring the hardware that would require, that's not a short- or even medium-term plan; I've still got a lot of catching up to do on the basics first. Like how far I'm allowed to tweak this current robotic body without triggering the whole new-identity thing - if you're going to let me fill out the forms on the socket I disabled, might as well save time and get everything done at once, neh?"
"Well, that's not /necessarily/ the case, as the more socially acceptable approach is usually to make a series of smaller changes, allowing one's identity to gradually adapt to and incorporate each alteration. Assuming you're familiar with the 'Ship of Theseus' philosophical paradox, a slightly fluid identity that can incorporate small replacement parts is the current framework applied by the Supreme Court's tests. But I can certainly work with you to help you determine your target body, and which changes could be made when to reach that target at minimal social cost..."
