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Sheldon Pacotti: Personally, I was skeptical of the dot-com boom from the beginning. When I joined the Deus Ex team I was already working on a dystopian novel, γ, which satirized the dot-com frenzy in the context of biotech and AI, circa 2037. The game's designer Warren Spector's vision of a future in which high technology empowers the elite felt to me like sober futurism compared to the dot-com delirium.
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Terrorism was in the air during the 1990s, though that's easy to forget. Events like the Oklahoma City and World Trade Center bombings, in 1995 and '93 respectively, were still fresh on people's minds, despite the booming economy and the West's presumed hegemony. In the US in particular, there was a sense of rising domestic terrorism, of a standoff between government and individualists. This feeling fed directly into the National Secessionist Forces of Deus Ex, a "threat from within" that probably felt truer in 2000 than it does today, when terrorism in the West is largely perceived as originating from outside our borders.
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Even as I was writing dialogue for the AI's in Deus Ex—Morpheus, Daedalus, Icarus and Helios—I was skeptical that AI would take the form of a humanoid intelligence. My feeling has been that AI would come but that it would creep into our daily lives slowly, augmenting our abilities in seemingly mundane ways while subtly robbing us of decision-making power.This particular notion of AI has arrived more quickly than I expected. I can't count how many times I've listened to people say how "the GPS" made them take a wrong turn. We are ceding control to software, not wanting to be troubled with things like reading maps or, perhaps soon, driving. Yet these advances always seem mundane once they become part of our lives. The pace of AI innovation has surprised me, especially in the area of brain research and modeling, but even with these accelerating developments I think software will continue to fit itself to human needs.Though AI will be running our world, especially in the area of business, its only ideologies will be macroeconomics and logistics. A truly autonomous, self-motivated electronic intelligence remains as distant today as it was in 2000, probably beyond the 2052 timeframe of Deus Ex.
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To me, a database providing "total awareness" of human activity seemed quite plausible, extrapolating from the web crawlers of the time, Moore's Law, and the universal hunger for information. What has surprised me is the eagerness with which Western governments have embraced such technologies to anticipate rather than just investigate wrongdoing.I always expected that in a computer-mediated society our lives would become inherently public, but the voraciousness with which governments (surveillance), companies (targeted ads, recommendations), and all of us (social media) have vacuumed up this data has taken me completely by surprise, though in retrospect these developments sure seem obvious.Denton has a conversation with Morpheus, one of the prototype surveillance AIs designed to monitor this sea of hijacked data. Morpheus has drawn some conclusions from its voyeurism binge, resulting in one of the game's most perceptive moments:
If I were approaching the Deus Ex universe today—and I must admit that I have no insight into what Eidos is planning for Deus Ex: Mankind Divided—would have to accept social networks as a physical fact of the world.
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More on technology and science and oh-god-we're-all-going-to-die-at-the-metal-hands-of-what-we've-made at Motherboard
Not that this theme isn't present in Deus Ex to some extent, but the dehumanization of warfare through automation is a trend I would want to explore. The calculus for using force changes dramatically when you don't have to risk your own people's lives. We're familiar with this from governmental drone strikes, but imagine what an organization willing to use suicide bombers would attempt with drone technology.Cyberwarfare between nations—and the success of governments in suppressing aspects of the internet they don't like—is another realm of societal conflict that suddenly seems like a plausible part of the world's future. In a Deus Ex game, I would be tempted to touch on cryptography, dark nets, and the accelerating arms race between secret subcultures and the governments that would observe them. To create a truly "secret" society in the future, you'll need to be a master of cryptography and computer security.Sheldon recently released Cell HD: Emergence on Steam, and plans to publish γ and more stories this year. See sheldonpacotti.com for more information.Follow Liam on Twitter.