scrape_r_rational/data/cache2/3yp5nu.md

[BST] [HF] What magics have low economic impact and don't revolutionize society?

• Author: u/EliezerYudkowsky Godric Gryffindor*

• URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/3yp5nu/bst_hf_what_magics_have_low_economic_impact_and/

• Score: 83

• Created: 2015-12-29T20:59:51

Post:

Whenever we introduce a form of magic into our fictional worlds, even a seemingly costly form of magic, we have to ask about the economic impact of people using that magic in the obvious way.

Is there a spell that creates a permanent Gate between two portals? OH HOLY SMOKES DISTANCE IS MEANINGLESS transport costs drop prices equalize between all areas big boosts to specialization since a single factory can sell anywhere winner-take-all markets people can live anywhere so urban density drops and empires have an easy time extending their reach lots of immigration EVERYWHERE IS CULTURALLY AND RACIALLY HOMOGENOUS within a couple of centuries...

Even if that Gate requires sacrificing a hundred virgins to create, people are going to create enough of them - the advantages are just too large and immediate and visible, and any society that refuses do it will probably be crushed underfoot, etcetera.

So the converse question is: What kinds of magic can you introduce into a setting without completely upsetting everything? This depends to a significant degree on where the background falls in a Stone Age to urban fantasy setting; magic that allows for instant communication wouldn't revolutionize today's world, nor would magic that allows for expensive instant communication revolutionize a steampunk world with telegraphs, but it might be a significant thing to the Roman Empire. Let's assume the background is Standard Medievalish Fantasyland but with slight urbanization or modernization being okay, so long as the Industrial Revolution doesn't start.

My thoughts on this so far:

• Destructive magic that isn't bomb-scale and can't be used to operate a steam engine, although plausibly they just don't yet have steam engines (those were admittedly invented considerably after fire).
• Magic that can create or copy things but is very expensive (too expensive to be used as a printing press)
• Health/medical magic that doesn't work for indefinite life extension. If it works for contraception, that has large social effects and then starts having evolutionary effects in a couple of generations.

What we really ought to have is the entire rational dictionary of Magical Effects and their Economic Implications, but for now I'm just interested in arguments for which classic or novel types of magic are "relatively innocuous compared to Gate spells", and can have been in the hands of thousands of people for hundreds of years without implying an industrial or post-industrial society.

Comments:

u/alexanderwales [+36] Time flies like an arrow (41 minutes later)

It depends on what magic we're talking about, how expensive it is, how reliable it is, and who has access to it.

• Only one hundred people can do magic at any given time, each day they use magic they have a one in a thousand chance of death. Low impact on setting relative to effects.

• Everyone can learn magic but it's difficult enough that only nobility do, magic exhausts the user, and magic fails during certain astrological configurations. Medium impact on setting relative to effects.

• Everyone can use magic, they get better with skill but the benefits are minor, there's no real cost. High impact on setting relative to effects.

So if we had a dictionary of "Magical Effects and their Economic Implications" we would also have to include axes of difficulty. (You can't replace the horse with a spell if that spell has worse results than a horse.)

There are spells like D&D's Ghost Sound that allow you to shout as loud as four humans, which does basically nothing when you can do it for ten minutes three times a day but can be harnessed for motive power if you can make that effect permanent.

I think you're largely looking at efficiency per dollar, but in some circumstances that can be hard to calculate, especially when magic is doing things that can't otherwise be accomplished like reading minds, erasing memories, creating demiplanes and extradimensional spaces, etc.

Edit: Take VirginGate, for example.

• If VirginGate lasts for ten seconds then shuts down, it doesn't revolutionize the world, because you can't put enough stuff through it.
• If VirginGate requires a million virgins, it doesn't revolutionize the world, because no one is going to be able to overcome the logistic costs associated with it.
• If VirginGate atomizes 90% of the things that pass through it, it probably doesn't revolutionize the world, because you're taking an automatic 90% loss on putting things like armies or trade goods through it. Though I suppose you could still keep resending letters, so it still allows for long-range communication.

u/davidmanheim [+41] (59 minutes later)

All I need now is a fully specified economic model for human preferences (at least, in medieval settings), a complete physics engine, and a huge amount of computation time, and this problem would be trivial.

u/Reasonableviking [+45] (an hour later)

Get ye to Bay 12 and Dwarf Fortress!

u/PeridexisErrant [+7] put aside fear for courage, and death for life (5 hours later)

Amen!

u/2BR02B [+9] Marxist-Lurianism (a day later)

I actually have a wonderful solution to all the above problems that this margin is too small to contain.

u/ctulhuslp [+10] (3 hours later)

So ,basically, impact of spell, as well as some piece of engineering IRL, depends on its cost and logistics associated.

Can't rules of thinking about mundane technology impact be applied to magic as well? Is there even a categorical and not numerical difference between how we should think about impact of wheel on our history and Gate on some fictional setting, for example? Yes, Gate may be faster etc, but they are both tools for enhancing mobility and bring nothing new in principle, only in (important, but still) details such as speed.

So question boils down to "What costs/limitations should be assigned to spells to avoid breaking setting down?", doesn't it?

u/alexanderwales [+12] Time flies like an arrow (3 hours later)

Yeah, the big issue is when you start bringing in effects that don't have an analog, like shape shifting, mind reading, mind control, enforced truth, memory erasure, and things like that, where you can't really boil it down to just cost and logistics.

u/None [+14] (an hour later)

[deleted]

u/ArgentStonecutter [+8] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (4 hours later)

As covered in Larry Niven: Theory and Practice of Teleportation.

u/PeridexisErrant [+2] put aside fear for courage, and death for life (5 hours later)

Link?

u/alexanderwales [+5] Time flies like an arrow (5 hours later)

It was reprinted in All the Myriad Ways. Amazon link here. So far as I could find there's only one version of it that's online, but that was on a shady Russian website and definitely isn't legit.

u/notgreat [+1] (2 days later)

Found this. No clue if it's legit though. Seems to be missing some illustrations.

u/Geminii27 [+5] (10 hours later)

that can be hard to calculate

Use the socioeconomic effects rather than the physical/magical ones. They'll probably have the same effects as if there was a purely science-based product/device which offered the same change to process.

Also, if VirginGate lasts for ten seconds reliably, it still has 90% of the functionality of a permanently open gate. In ten seconds, you can put a high-speed train or other timed cargo carrier through it. You can also put people in elevators and drop them through it. You can deliver most small to medium items. You can pour sand, grain, oil, water, and all sorts of other things through it, even if you leave half a second either side for testing/checking.

It becomes a matter of how much volume you can stuff through a gate, or series of gates, or set of parallel gates, per 24 hours (or per quarter) per dollar. If the cost is high, then it's going to be used sparingly - only by governments, militaries, and very wealthy people/corporations. If the cost is low but the volume is also low, it's only going to be used to transport things which are valuable for their size or would benefit from immediate transport. It would still revolutionize communication. If the cost per gate opening is high but you can put a lot of volume through it before it closes, it might be used by primary industry and for long-distance bulk transport - think international airports and ports rather than domestic ones. And so on.

u/TimTravel [+4] (12 hours later)

There are spells like D&D's Ghost Sound that allow you to shout as loud as four humans, which does basically nothing when you can do it for ten minutes three times a day but can be harnessed for motive power if you can make that effect permanent.

Tangent: there was a hilarious /r/dnd post about a guy whose party arranged for a whole team of people to scream at the main villain 24-7 with this spell.

Your restrictions can reduce the impact of almost anything. If the cost is low and risk is low but the impact is still small that would be a more interesting answer.

u/abcd_z [+1] (a day later)

Do you have a link?

u/TimTravel [+1] (a day later)

I do not, sorry. It was a poll thread so it's hard to find.

u/Uncaffeinated [+4] (19 hours later)

Before steam power, a 90% loss would still be worth it on many trade goods.

u/alexanderwales [+6] Time flies like an arrow (21 hours later)

I was thinking about this in the shower last night. For a 90% loss to be economical, transportation needs to make up more than 90% of the cost of the trade good at its destination. My mind went to the Silk Road, meaning spices and textiles, and the triangular trade across the Atlantic, meaning slaves and tobacco. I didn't remember to look it up until now, but it's really hard to find prices for things before steam power, let alone relative prices for things that are quite far from each other and using different currencies.

(I believe slaves were the more valuable commodity to go across the oceans, mostly due to excess supply caused by ethnic wars. There are great numbers available about the cost of slaves at their destination, but a paucity of numbers about the cost of slaves at their source. I don't have too much trouble believing that transport costs were 90% of total cost though, but owing to fluctuating currency conversions it's tough to say, and I'd have to subtract profit margins as well, and we can't assume the portal is a perfectly frictionless mechanism for trade with none of its own costs.)

At any rate it's not clear to me which trade goods would have been worth it. That aside, useful is very different than revolutionary. A portal that reduces the cost of transport by some fraction (even by half) would change the shape of history but not actually make a society undergo something equivalent to the Industrial Revolution.

u/Uncaffeinated [+2] (23 hours later)

I suppose it depends a lot on the particular time and place. I think spices would have been worth that much for most of history though.

u/alexanderwales [+5] Time flies like an arrow (a day later)

Like I said, I've been looking around trying to get some actual numbers and they're hard to find. If someone would just say "In 1660 a pound of cinnamon cost the equivalent of £10 and sold in London for the equivalent of £110, with transportation making up 91% of the increased cost" then we'd know for sure, but so far I haven't found anything that goes into that much detail.

African slaves were more profitable than spices for a long period of time, but the closest that I can get is finding the price of a slave in South Carolina and comparing it against the price of a slave sold in Zanzibar (both places with relatively good record keeping). If I had a few weeks to work on it I might be able to make a chart of the difference in price, but that would mean trying to figure out the exchange rate of Maria Theresa thalers (used in Zanzibar) with the three varieties of currency used in South Carolina. My best guess is that there were a few decades where you could buy a slave for one money unit and sell a slave for ten money units, but that this was by no means constant.

And ten to one doesn't actually cover it, because a few of the sources of increased cost remain, including the cost of transporting payment or personnel over that distance, export tax, import tax, etc. Which would be more weeks of work to figure out and would depend on some of the particulars of the portal.

Anyway, that's all sort of moot because the big difference between historic trade routes and the annihilation portal is that they value different things. If you're moving goods by caravan or by sea, what you most care about is profit per pound, because it costs you £X to get 100 tonnes from Sri Lanka to London. With the portal, the thing you care most about is relative price, because it costs you price of goods in Sri Lanka times nine to get any number of tonnes from Sri Lanka to London. If a thousand tonnes of some material is £1 in Sri Lanka and £100 in London, then it's completely unprofitable to ship (the average 17th century sailing ship would gain £99 from the trip, which wouldn't be enough to cover crew/supplies/repairs) but wildly profitable to portal.

u/Lugnut1206 [+8] (an hour later)

If it provable atomizes exactly 9/10 items, and the 10th item in the sequence goes through every time, you could just chuck filler material through there.

10 seconds then shuts down would work really well for FTL travel or extremely high data transfer rates in a modern, digital society. Just chuck some raid arrays through there - bam, extremely high speed short duration data transfer. Copy of wikipedia sent to space colonies?

u/WTFwhatthehell [+1] (27 days later)

if it takes 10 virgins, unless the society is OK with regular infanticide with some kind of breeding facility for sacrificial humans then it'd have to be spectacularly valuable data to be worth killing a hundred virgins to transport it.

u/DrJoel [+29] (34 minutes later)

What about something like "turn rocks into gold" as a non-trivial answer? I'd you've got a society that uses a literal gold standard, a naive reader might think this is instant wealth, etc. But my understanding is that gold's value was a combination of rarity, prettiness, malleability and, hence, desirability by true wealthy types. (Or is that a "just so" story?)

So while valuable if the spell is unknown to most people (and not overused, so that wizards are still price takers), once widely available, you'd see inflationary effects and/or a move to a different metal for money, and things wouldn't change much. Gold jewellery would become as common as plastic earrings are to us, although it would still take work to produce, houses might have more guiding (but, again, work requirements would limit it, etc.)

No doubt it's even more complicated (how many wizards are there?) but I can't see it transforming the world. Thoughts?

u/Transfuturist [+17] Carthago delenda est. (36 minutes later)

Without its rarity, gold is essentially useless to a medieval society, I believe. It wouldn't just be jewelry, it would be cheap jewelry for peasants. The upper classes would be wearing copper or aluminium, perhaps.

u/ArgentStonecutter [+54] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (an hour later)

Gold's got a bunch of useful characteristics.

OK, what could you do with gold in medieval societies if it were actually cheaper than rocks.

Gold is non-tarnishing and easy to make watertight. You'd cover roofs with it. You'd cover outside walls with it. It's malleable, so it'll wear off, but it's also easy to repair.

Gold is heavy. It makes great ballast for boats. It makes great ballistic weapons - bullets, cannonballs. It's not really strong enough for arrowheads.

Gold is watertight and malleable. Gold piping would be used everywhere, canals and tanks would be lined with the stuff. Poor farmers would use it to line and cover their irrigation ditches.

You can beat gold thin enough it's transparent. Gold foil isn't all that strong, but it's durable. It would be used instead of paper for long term record keeping.

u/SvalbardCaretaker [+30] Mouse Army (2 hours later)

Gold pipes obviously dont poison their users over time, as opposed to lead pipes.

No more robbing teeth from the dead for tooth replacement, just use gold.

If its really ubiquitious you might try to enhance your cobblestone roads with it.

u/ArgentStonecutter [+34] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (3 hours later)

Another one I thought of driving home. You would use the spell for mining and tunneling and road construction. It's easier to dig into gold than rocks, so you'd turn the rock into gold and dig it out with picks or melt it out with fire. If you could control it well enough you could cast the spell into a plane behind a rock face and peel off a layer of marble veneer that would be more valuable than gold.

u/Xtraordinaire [+12] Team Glimglam (18 hours later)

I guess it could also work for destructive purposes. Turning critical pieces of stone buildings like castles, cathedrals, bridges and later sky-scrapers will probably result in destruction of said building. Medieval sieges could be very different.

u/ArgentStonecutter [+4] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (18 hours later)

Good point.

Heck, how about turning people into gold?

u/alexanderwales [+13] Time flies like an arrow (19 hours later)

I think that most magics that don't have firm bounds on them can become Endbringer class by just amping them up. If you start with "turning things into gold" then the impact it has depends on the range, control, etc. A spell that you can cast three times a day to turn a touched piece of rock not greater than a cubic foot into gold is pretty minor if everyone can do it. Being able to freely turn anything within line-of-sight into gold at the speed of thought destroys civilizations. Same goes if you're limited to stone but stone includes things that are in the human body. If rock includes "mineralized tissues" and the spell requires no line-of-sight and can be done at great range, then you could seriously injure a person.

Mostly I think it's difficult to find an effect that's not revolutionary once you start lifting some of the explicit or implicit restrictions. "Create light" is implied (or explicitly) something like torchlight, limited to line-of-sight or close by, not stackable, difficult to make images with, only in the visible spectrum, etc. But once you start lifting those, you get revolutions in dozens of different directions.

u/ArgentStonecutter [+3] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (20 hours later)

"Create light" is implied (or explicitly) something like torchlight, limited to line-of-sight or close by, not stackable, difficult to make images with, only in the visible spectrum, etc. But once you start lifting those, you get revolutions in a dozens of different directions.

Like in that Niven story where Beowulf Schaeffer discovers the Core Explosion, and spends some time trying to remember if any of the Puppeteer's customer species can see in X-Ray, since his ship's hull is designed to be "transparent" for all of them.

u/chaosmosis [+2] and with strange aeons, even death may die (13 hours later)

Relevant username.

u/ArgentStonecutter [+7] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (14 hours later)

Alas, "argent" is silver, not gold.

u/krashnburn200 [+1] (2 days later)

Magical 3d printing... Just turn all the rock that's NOT your shape to gold. Then melt it away.

u/None [+6] (an hour later)

I've heard something about "in the name of all gold-plated plant life on Terra", and now you could make it literally true!

u/TimTravel [+3] (12 hours later)

You'd cover roofs with it.

They do that in The Last Continent in Discworld!

u/RMcD94 [+1] (13 days later)

None of those really seem like massively world changing, plastic a bit earlier it looks like no?

Is it much easier to work with than copper or lead?

u/ArgentStonecutter [+1] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (13 days later)

Plastic was pretty world changing, and this would be cheaper and safer than plastic.

u/Xtraordinaire [+23] Team Glimglam (58 minutes later)

Nah, gold is awesome. It does not corrode, it is malleable, it is not toxic.

Imagine Romans not having to eat out of leaden tableware. Imagine golden water pipes everywhere. Think of the irrigation!

u/hoja_nasredin [+17] Dai-Gurren Brigade (an hour later)

this. You get an upgraded version of copper. In medieval times nothing really changes.

u/Chronophilia [+5] sci-fi ≠ futurology (17 hours later)

Malleable copper or non-toxic lead, yeah. Useful, but not world-breaking.

u/Transfuturist [+7] Carthago delenda est. (an hour later)

True. But you still don't want solid gold, just plating and alloys.

u/Xtraordinaire [+14] Team Glimglam (an hour later)

That's where extreme malleability comes in handy. Gold plating is easy to produce.

u/lsparrish [+7] (2 days later)

"Rock to gold!" the wizard said.

The large pile of rocks in a basket at the top of a lever arm turned to gold and slowly dragged it towards the ground. The mechanism at the base clanked and whirred, spinning a grindstone.

Hours later, the it was time to cast the reversal spell.

"Gold to rocks!"

A spring-loaded mechanism pulled the lightened basket high into the air.

u/Vebeltast [+3] You should have expected the bayesian inquisition! (a day later)

Relevant: an essay, with suggestions and mechanical analysis, on the effects of eleventh-level Wizards in DND 3.x being able to Wish for small amounts of gold basically indefinitely. http://dnd-wiki.org/wiki/Dungeonomicon_(3.5e_Sourcebook)/Economicon#The_Economicon:_Making_Sense_of_the_Gold_Standard

u/trifith [+24] Man plans, god laughs. Like the ant and the grasshopper. (19 minutes later)

Divination effects with only slightly better than chance accuracy, and moderate to high cost?

u/EliezerYudkowsky [+30] Godric Gryffindor (24 minutes later)

Now there's an interesting question. Is there anything world-breaking you could do in a world (that's already adapted to the magic, not our world, so no stock market shenanigans) where divination spells can only be asked binary questions, are 60% accurate, and multiple castings by different people with related questions make correlated errors?

u/EliezerYudkowsky [+31] Godric Gryffindor (34 minutes later)

Another way of looking at this is that the oracle only provides evidence with 0.6:0.4 likelihood ratios. You ask "Is my spouse cheating on me?" and the answer is yes, but you were only 1.5 times as likely to get that question in cheating scenarios than in non-cheating scenarios, so if your prior was lower than 40% it should still be under 50% after hearing the new evidence. It seems like society could survive that, especially since people would know many many cases of divinations being wrong - they might even have started to grasp the concept of prior odds.

u/mjr_ [+46] (37 minutes later)

they might even have started to grasp the concept of prior odds.

gasp Society revolutionized.

u/psychothumbs [+29] (an hour later)

I like the idea that it's not so much the divination itself that would be revolutionary, but instead that this kind of divination would force people to understand probability better in general, and that's what would have the revolutionary effect.

u/boomfarmer [+4] Trying to be helpful (5 hours later)

It would make scientific research easier to verify, that's for sure.

u/macfirbolg [+6] (8 hours later)

More importantly, it would be much easier to decide which research to pursue. A 60% guarantee that there is a meaningful effect to investigate or that a given research path would reveal the source of an effect would be a tremendous boost to any proto-sciences being developed.

u/EliezerYudkowsky [+10] Godric Gryffindor (20 hours later)

That's not what you get from likelihood ratios of 1.5.

u/None [+3] (5 hours later)

Not much easier. Hopefully you'd have enough evidence that it would drown out what the correlated errors of divination produce.

u/davidmanheim [+15] (48 minutes later)

How closely correlated are the answers? And how smart is the spell-engine? ("Was the answer to my previous query accurate?")

If it wasn't a deal breaker, it would lead to some interesting effects, at the very least, with level 1 intelligent characters. Information theory would be developed much earlier than otherwise, at least. OTOH, this is how a fair amount of nonrational!fic, and possibly historical humanity, treats divination and similar methods, and no-one thought of this, so maybe not.

More seriously, it would probably eliminate (high stakes) games of chance; there is too much people can do to break them. Or at least, it would change them in interesting ways. Hmmm...

u/thesteamboat [+13] (an hour later)

With a source of randomness (which worked independent of the casting) you can do boosting to get near perfect oracles. E.g. Is the answer to my question yes XOR this next coin flip comes up heads.

u/thesteamboat [+8] (2 hours later)

Upon second thought, boosting is totally overkill for this scenario. Just being able to repeat the divination is sufficient.

u/davidmanheim [+9] (3 hours later)

As noted before, this depends on the correlations. (You machine learning people like using independence assumptions, but they rarely actually apply.)

u/qbolec [+2] (23 hours later)

Could you please explain it how it would work?

u/Psy-Kosh [+14] (2 hours later)

The usual causal loop outcome pump tricks would still be potentially useful. It wouldn't be as strong an effect, but would still at least allow nontrivial tweaking of probabilities. Wouldn't be as powerful, but depending on specifics of how it worked, could still potentially let someone clever tell thermodynamics to go jump in a lake, among other things.

Security/espionage/etc would have to adapt to that possibility. The usual "code words"/challenge-response protocols would be risky for any higher security thing if this trick could be abused to have at least a reasonable chance of successful infiltration.

These are just some possibilities off the top of my head.

A possible countermeasure for the infiltration thing would be for the security people to do the divination themselves. Depending on how correlated the errors tend to be, you could predict a vulnerability in advance.

Actually, investigating ways to abuse the fact of correlation of errors between related queries seems like a general thing to consider.

u/clawclawbite [+11] (an hour later)

Shipping and weather forecasts. Field management. Fewer lost ships makes trade cheaper and easier. Explorations and expeditions safer. Stock up on trade goods more likely to sell high. If you take the 60/40/on a large stack of goods, your margins almost certainly go up. Chemistry and medications become better tested. More dyes with rare ingredients get developed. More and cheaper metals from better mine site selection...

u/Adrastos42 [+4] I got a B in critical thinking! (6 hours later)

Weather would be a big one. Imagine having a 60℅ accurate forecast 10 years in advance when you're, say, budgeting for disaster planning.

u/None [+7] (6 hours later)

As others here pointed out, it really depends on exactly what "correlated errors" means.

It makes perfect sense to interpret this as meaning that identical questions get identical answers. But what if X and Y are events and I ask "will at least one of X and Y happen?" How should that correlate with asking whether X happens, whether Y happens, whether both X and Y happen?

u/MaxChaplin [+4] (an hour later)

It depends on how correlated. You could test it with questions like "Will a mathematician from [city name here] prove that 2+2=3?" and "Will my [body part name here] be on the moon tomorrow?" to see whether the answer ratio is 60%/40%, 100%/0% or something in between. After finding the conditions for correlation, prophets could start process akin to crystallization: starting from a question with an obviously true (false) answer, they'd ask slightly modified questions which get similarly true (false) answers, thus expanding the truth-crystal (bullshit-crystal) throughout the answerspace.

u/Gurkenglas [+3] (2 hours later)

"Suppose that there is an AIXI told to maximize my CEV as of when I asked the first of these questions behind a cartesian barrier with infinite computational ressources, omniscience of the universe and the laws of science and magic. What is the first bit of its output?" Repeat for second, etcetera. If there is an exploit, this finds it. Depending on how chaos theory works, I expect a Simurgh song optimizing the world a fraction of a bit at a time, or a grainy black and white picture of the perfect plan (because I happened to fill the output into squared paper).

u/itisike [+2] Dragon Army (6 hours later)

How does 60% accuracy on AIXI's output help?

u/Gurkenglas [+3] (6 hours later)

It can predict that each bit of output has a 40% chance of being flipped, and adjust the output it sends accordingly. (By the way, this doesn't even need to be AIXI, just the AI from that Computerphile video, since it has a perfect model of reality by definition)

u/itisike [+5] Dragon Army (6 hours later)

At the end of the day, you only get 60% accuracy. If we assume the divination process won't get stuck in an infinite loop, then the AI can't outsmart it, and it's not clear that there will be any useful output.

u/Gurkenglas [+7] (7 hours later)

Oh, I didn't mean it could predict the random number generator the accuracy thing uses. It could send the sequence of bits such that the expected value of the universe that results after all accuracy errors are applied is maximized.

u/itisike [+1] Dragon Army (14 hours later)

But maybe you can't increase the utility of the universe through an inaccurate channel like that. Clearly you couldn't through one with 50% accuracy, and it's not obvious that you would be able to with 60%.

u/Gurkenglas [+2] (18 hours later)

Assuming that the AI can see into the future, asking for one bit splits the tree of future timelines along the arbitrary seam of the answer I receive. The AI, by choosing the answer it sends, prunes 40% of one half and 60% of the other. Depending on how quantum physics work in that universe, this is equivalent to having a guy with Coil's power sitting around that you can call to drop one of the timelines he's been keeping since you asked the AI for a bit (except that he pretty often drops the wrong timeline by accident). If splitting along arbitrary seams doesn't make the future timeline trees look different from each other, we can take our sequence of ones and zeroes and start letting things depend on them: As said above with that grainy picture line, we can fill the bits into the squares of a page of checkered paper, and squint at it from far away; a 40% error rate shouldn't make a black-and-white image unrecognizable, right? At least if we make the squares small enough. If that doesn't work (presumably because of how the errors correlate), we can refer to the next bit of the answers we received whenever we make a decision. Whenever we happen upon an important one (where the future timeline trees finally differ), we get a fraction of a bit of the world optimized. The point is, as soon as one of these schemes has a chance to work (or even before that), the AI does all it can to steer me (or others) towards following it, and exploits it to hell. Getting out of a lossy transmission box can't be that hard for a literal omniscience.

u/itisike [+2] Dragon Army (18 hours later)

a 40% error rate shouldn't make a black-and-white image unrecognizable, right

You're gonna need example tests for this.

u/roystgnr [+2] (2 days later)

It's not obvious, but it is true.

u/itisike [+2] Dragon Army (2 days later)

How would you apply that to a discrete problem like ours? That discusses Gaussian noise over continuous messages, not binary.

u/roystgnr [+2] (4 days later)

Sorry; I originally accidentally pasted a link to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon%E2%80%93Hartley_theorem when I meant to link to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noisy-channel_coding_theorem - I thought I edited that pretty fast, but you must have read it faster.

The channel capacity of a binary channel with 60% accuracy has to be dismal, something like 3% of the bit rate, but you can get arbitrarily close to that: for any epsilon error probability tolerance, you can choose a code with a large enough block size and get ~3% of each block as correct data with sub-epsilon probability of failure.

u/PlaneOfInfiniteCats [+1] (3 days later)

If you ask for "n-th bit of the message", varying n, discrete problem turns continuous. Unless I severely misunderstood the theorem, that is.

u/itisike [+1] Dragon Army (3 days later)

A continuous number has an uncountable number of possibilities, while n ranging over 1 to infinity only yields a countable number possible outcomes.

I haven't studied information theory formally, so it may be that it applies, it's just not obvious from that page and what I know.

u/lucraft [+17] (13 minutes later)

Familiars, as in His Dark Materials.

u/None [+11] (an hour later)

If they are as physically powerful as the animal they imitate but sentient then there are a lot of implications for them, e.g. operating small machinery, or separated flying demons can be excellent messengers in a pre radio world. Imagine he roman empire if information could travel at the speed of a bird rather than a hand messenger

u/ArgentStonecutter [+15] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (3 hours later)

Daemons can't travel more than a certain distance from their human, or both suffer weakness and pain and eventually death. Which really sucks if you have a dolphin for a daemon.

u/None [+14] (3 hours later)

Canonically that can be overcome, most notably by the witches. In a realistic universe the social taboo would likely be overcome by the strong economic incentive

u/TimTravel [+5] (12 hours later)

It can be overcome but it's emotionally traumatic. I seem to remember witches have a higher limit but it's still finite.

u/Frommerman [+1] (2 days later)

I mean, if you have access to the Subtle Knife (and feel that creating more specters is morally counterbalanced by whatever you are going to do with your globetrotting Daemon), you could just stretch the tether by going into Tartarus. That should get rid of most of your limits.

u/boomfarmer [+10] Trying to be helpful (5 hours later)

The daemons depicted in His Dark Materials were as physically powerful as the animal they took the form of, but there was an extreme, pan-cultural taboo against a human touching the daemon of another person. Daemons can touch daemons (indeed it's part of courting rituals), but pretty much only married couples touch each others daemons, and even then it's salacious.

Soldiers have wolf daemons, but the wolves only fight other soldiers' daemons. The dog daemons belonging to cops do doglike things, but they're not going to bite a human. They might trap the human's daemon, though.

u/Geminii27 [+10] (10 hours later)

Which is a huge cultural weakness. Anyone wanting to conquer them would simply attack/capture the daemons. They might even bring trained non-daemon animals of their own, effectively allowing them to field two armies that looked to the enemy like one.

I mean, hell. Send in your trained wolves / wardogs / whatever as a rush. The opponents' social conditioning means that their human soldiers, and thus the bulk of their weapons, don't get deployed. Their daemons are smarter, yes, but they're also constrained with the distance they can wander from their humans, making them slower to cover ground. Even if your entire wardog division is destroyed, they might lose 30% of their daemons and thus 30% of their humans. Meanwhile, your human army has zero casualties, isn't needing to take care of wounded or deal with piled-up corpses, and hasn't just come out of a pitched battle.

(Come to think of it, given that your wardogs would be that much faster over terrain than your opponents' armies, why not send them into your opponent's camp equipped with timed-release poisons and biological agents (or explosives, if you have them)? Or infect them with something nasty before the charge?)

Then, of course, once you send in your humans, their daemons might be conditioned not to attack you (if they're OK with attacking daemonless humans, you can release a bunch of dumb wildlife onto the battlefield to take up their attention) - but you have no such restriction.

u/boomfarmer [+3] Trying to be helpful (20 hours later)

trained non-daemon animals of their own

you can release a bunch of dumb wildlife onto the battlefield to take up their attention

The problem with this idea is that, canonically, animals and daemons recognize each other as other. Animals know that daemons aren't animals, even if you have a sparrow daemon sitting next to a sparrow. The sparrow is going to fly off. This is (headcanonically) the result of thirty-three years of evolutionary pressure caused by daemonically-assisted hunting and also (maybe canonically) because daemons dissolve into gold sparkles when their human dies. I think that humans are also able to differentiate daemons from animals, but i'm not certain if that's covered in the books. Generally a daemon without its human would be more willing to speak.

But aside from that, the wardog approach to warfare is the equivalent of near-future dorne/robot warfare. Send in the non-humans, because they'll kill the humans. If it's a feasible technique, then any up-to-date military will have a nonhuman assets program, just like any up-to-date military will have machine guns and training in enfilade fire.

u/Chosen_Pun [+3] The Chosen Ones (5 hours later)

I think the overall impact vis-a-vis Progress or Quality of Life would still be pretty low, since there aren't a lot of tasks a human population needs done that what basically amounts to a random distribution of frolicking woodland creatures can do significantly better, and historically, humans have domesticated animals for exactly those reasons.

Maybe it turns out that tiny monkeys with human-level intelligence are good at building tiny computers, or something, but I'm not convinced a society containing tiny monkeys with human-level intelligence will think of inventing tiny computers significantly earlier.

u/ArgentStonecutter [+14] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (17 minutes later)

I would pay any amount of money for a daemon.

u/EliezerYudkowsky [+18] Godric Gryffindor (21 minutes later)

How much money do you have? There's such a thing as BDSM!slaves.

u/ArgentStonecutter [+29] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (27 minutes later)

BDSM!slaves aren't telempathic talking shapeshifting animals.

u/EliezerYudkowsky [+33] Godric Gryffindor (29 minutes later)

You can tell them what you're thinking, and have them dress in cat ears if that part really matters.

u/derefr [+19] (35 minutes later)

You could also have your slave pilot around a furry drone body, ala FF7's Cait Sith. That drone body could then pair with your phone and thus give the person at the console quite a lot of "empathic" info through the phone's Health/Fitness-tracking APIs—and that's ignoring how much they'd know just from having access to your Facebook and e-mail (they'd basically be doing the Magic version of Google Now.)

...this seems like a good story all on its own, now that I think about it.

u/Transfuturist [+9] Carthago delenda est. (41 minutes later)

Or they could pilot a spoopy speleton.

u/ArgentStonecutter [+8] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (38 minutes later)

I know you're smarter than that.

u/protagnostic [+2] (59 minutes later)

As much fun as master/slave play is, it just doesn't quite feel the same.

u/clawclawbite [+6] (56 minutes later)

Yes, but the ones you want tend not to be the ones you can buy...

u/RagtimeViolins [+2] (22 minutes later)

The soulbond part would need a little work. Perhaps a mnemonic snare?

u/Subrosian_Smithy [+1] Nudist Beach (a day later)

What if you're more interested in being a slave then having a slave? Where do you get a Daemon from then?

u/Geminii27 [+7] (10 hours later)

They always creeped me out. They're generally small, fragile animals, and if they get killed you die. Unless you get something like a bear as your familiar, it's equivalent to having your heart or another major organ wandering around the landscape.

Did the books ever say what happens if a familiar is physically forced a long distance away from its bonded partner? Does it cause pain? Death? Something else?

u/sir_pirriplin [+3] (17 hours later)

It causes pain, and some people (notably the witches) train themselves to withstand that pain and turn their familiars into spies.

u/ChaserOfWisdom [+1] (7 years later)

I think that witches just natively had more "range", and it wasn't from training. It was one of their supernatural abilities. A normal human couldn't learn to do it.

u/sir_pirriplin [+1] (7 years later)

Two non-witch characters learned how to do it because they were forced to spend some time away from their familiars.

u/RagtimeViolins [+16] (11 minutes later)

Easy one off the top of my head: Long-distance communication spells with long response times.

u/RagtimeViolins [+11] (15 minutes later)

Further examples: Almost any personal defensive magic, provided it is as heavy as ordinary alternatives;

Spells to control emotion for a short time, provided they were not too strong and couldn't just be chained together;

Changing the manner in which consciousness is experienced, because the worst that could do is cause insanity in those incredibly incapable of adaptation to new circumstances.

u/Aabcehmu112358 [+5] Utter Fallacy (4 hours later)

The content of a message would have to be equally or more obtainable by eavesdroppers than a physical message, or really unbearably long response times, in order for this to not have some potentially big impacts due to secrecy.

u/RagtimeViolins [+9] (4 hours later)

Secrecy is one area in which suspicion of secrecy is just as good. In medieval times it would be possible provided one trusted the messenger completely; as such it would have an effect here but not - in my view - a world-changing one.

u/JoshuaZ1 [+3] (27 minutes later)

How long response times are you thinking?

u/RagtimeViolins [+9] (31 minutes later)

Longer than the conventional means at the time of input. It'd only be relevant over impassable terrain - effectively, all communication would be based on as-the-crow-flies distances.

u/derefr [+7] (38 minutes later)

So, somewhat like a Patronus, then: effectively incorporeal, immortal messenger birds.

u/RagtimeViolins [+11] (an hour later)

Similar, but the exact mechanism's not as important as the relative inefficiency.

u/TimTravel [+3] (12 hours later)

Is it secure communication? That's very useful.

u/RagtimeViolins [+2] (17 hours later)

Useful, but not world-changing. It would foster paranoia more than anything else.

And anyway, the only point at which it's more secure is in transit - people can still eavesdrop at either end.

u/DrunkenQuetzalcoatl [+15] (an hour later)

I just went through a collection of spells in Skyrim for inspiration.

Candlelight, Detect Life, Waterbreathing, Muffle and Call to Arms would fit the bill I think.

Of course so would every spell targeting the undead ... in a world without undead.

u/SvalbardCaretaker [+20] Mouse Army (2 hours later)

Waterbreathing would be awesome. Rivers are no longer a huge barrier for travel, fishing becomes a lot easier, building bridges is tons easier, nobody dies of drowning anymore.

When cesar had his legions building a bridge over the rhine it was a big fucking deal^tm !

u/Tommy2255 [+12] (5 hours later)

Water breathing in Skyrim requires level 50 Alteration, so it would only be usable by people with substantial training (halfway to perfection). Probably useful for fishermen, but it only lasts 60 seconds so it probably wouldn't help with transportation, unless it was just a small team of amphibious troops crossing rivers or whatever.

Probably some battles go differently, perhaps a few fewer people die of starvation in rural fishing communities, but I don't think it would be a huge shift if it were very difficult.

u/Nebu [+9] (4 hours later)

nobody dies of drowning anymore

Some people would still die, just like some people today are still illiterate, or die for stupid, avoidable reasons.

u/SvalbardCaretaker [+1] Mouse Army (4 hours later)

Sure.

u/luminarium [+12] (3 hours later)

Do you realize how useful those spells are?

• Candlelight: Instant light bulb anywhere without need for electricity, you could use it to do stuff at night like read, build, etc.
• Detect life: Detect the presence of people through walls. Makes towns and buildings nigh impervious to infiltration when done right.
• Waterbreathing: Crossing rivers
• Call to Arms: Force multiplier in war.

u/DrunkenQuetzalcoatl [+10] (3 hours later)

Yes they are very useful. But I don't see how they would cause industrialization or similar massive changes.

u/Chosen_Pun [+11] The Chosen Ones (6 hours later)

An "Instant light bulb" spell might actually delay certain advancements.

u/Geminii27 [+3] (10 hours later)

It'd let people read at night and when they were inside with no source of light. It'd allow cellars and enclosed rooms to be useful without needing torches or lanterns to be brought in, maintained, and replaced.

To an extent, it'd allow stronger walls for some constructions, because windows wouldn't be needed for light.

u/Chosen_Pun [+1] The Chosen Ones (2 days later)

In the long run, it would also deprioritize the invention of the actual lightbulb, and stunt that entire tech tree.

u/lehyde [+9] Nudist Beach (4 hours later)

I think "Candlelight" actually fits the requirements if the result is really only as bright as a candle and one person can only cast one such spell. Sure, people wouldn't buy (as much) candles anymore but I don't think candles were that expensive to begin with (they can be made from animal fat).

Another necessary restriction might be that the spell can't be cast in quick succession otherwise it could be used for Morse code.

u/BrainstormSurge [+13] (an hour later)

Illusion magic in a limiting aspect would simply improve entertainment. It would be easily identified as an illusion so you couldn't use it to deceive or bluff. It can't be permanent so you can't create hidden entrances, or even better a permanent repository of knowledge that can't be destroyed conventionally.

It can only be cast a short distance. It obviously would still improve communication. This could be limited for example by the magic needing to be put on something physical like a piece of paper first, so the cost of sending messages wouldn't lessen.

I'm sure it could still be used for psychological warfare or torture such as showing something grotesque but as I said before illusions would be easily identified by any layman.

It can't provide any form of lighting otherwise you could produce cheap illumination. Maybe you could eventually allow it such as coming with the same cost as flash powder or similar things, but depending on the setting it couldn't provide lighting unless someone is nearby to maintain it constantly. Something like having a light in your hand, but the effort is so much that it can't be maintained that long.

It may be okay to let it improve documentation such as conjuring an image of an animal nobody else has seen before long enough for someone to sketch it onto paper. This would allow someone that does that to send teams of illusionists into the world to document things and come back with the results, but it obviously is still coming with the cost of simply having a team of sketch artists do the same thing.

I hope I've covered enough on the magic and how to limit it properly.

u/DaystarEld [+14] Pokémon Professor (2 hours later)

Any magic that operates on an absolute ("instant" anything, subverting the idea of relative time, "unbreakable" anything, subverting the idea of force or erosion, "anywhere" effects, subverting the idea of distance/space, etc) can and will break society-as-we-know-it once a munchkin of sufficient intelligence is born to recognize the non-obvious advantages it can be used for.

On the other hand, magic that just makes doing things more expedient/easy can be fairly low impact and not utterly upsetting the economy/society, assuming the person gaining the ability/training it is rare enough to be treated like a super-specialized professional.

Some ideas:

• Botany Magic. Basically being able to do what we do with careful breeding and genetic engineering of plants, but more "intuitively" and faster. It could create very nutritious and high yield crops, effective medicines, deadly poisons, etc, but wouldn't really "break" society unless users start making chimera creatures that cross animal kingdoms, which could be restricted by arbitrary "the magic only works on plants" type of rules, or less arbitrary reasons why doing it with less "simple" organisms is much harder and unpredictable.

• Illusion Magic of almost any kind. A team working in tandem that can create sounds, smells, sights and so on can revolutionize entertainment and alter how wars are fought (depending on how big/massively affecting the illusions can be), but in general being able to make people perceive things you can imagine doesn't usually break much in society.

• Telepathy Magic, as long as it's sufficiently distance restricted and doesn't grant sapience/intelligence to the receiver. It would make any activity dealing with animals much easier (being able to know that your dog is barking because it smells what it identifies as another dog versus a potential home invader), including domestication and using trained animals in more specialized situations, from construction to cartography to warfare.

u/Geminii27 [+3] (10 hours later)

in general being able to make people perceive things you can imagine doesn't usually break much in society.

Perfectly concealed assassins, disguised as part of a wall or ceiling. False results from any kind of test or check that involves looking at or listening to something. Food-tasters can now be foiled, as can checking whether something is rotten or unfit to eat by smelling it. Bureaucratic and multiperson systems which operate based on one person seeing the results of another person's work (not so much in terms of a dense stack of text, but more along the lines of "I see that the mail-sorting team has placed no items in Master Importantdude's pigeonhole this morning, so I don't need to carry anything to his desk." Or "I have to check the tally board each morning and report if there are more than ten marks." Or "I checked the outgoing table for the last extreme-importance diplomatic run of the season, and couldn't see anything on it." Or "What emergency whistle?"

u/DaystarEld [+1] Pokémon Professor (11 hours later)

The thing is, these are all things that can, to various degrees, be emulated in our world. Assassins don't always need to be perfectly concealed to be effective. Would it help? Sure, but it doesn't break society unless it's completely foolproof. Same with information espionage or falsification. And since the question is about magic that's well known and spread through society, knowing the existence and limitations of illusion magic would go a long way toward ensuring that people in the most serious of circumstances have the ability to test and protect against deception, the same way knowing that such a thing as forging documents exists would help against that.

In a society where illusion magic is unkown, an illusionist could walk through a city as rich as he pleases, handing people 1 dollar bills that read as 100s, or copper coins that are seen as gold. In a society where illusion magic is known to be something that can change a specific sense within X distance for Y duration under Z limitations, safeguards can be put in place for most any circumstance.

u/Geminii27 [+2] (13 hours later)

Well, yes, things which are already well-known and integrated into society are in general not terribly likely to change society. If you have a society which has already integrated magics that we ourselves would consider gamebreaking and worldchanging, it's not going to be changed by re-introducing a thing which, for them, already exists.

The original question presumes by its own existence that whatever magic you choose as your example is not already known in the society you're choosing to theoretically introduce it to. Otherwise you get the equivalent of "What if our modern society was suddenly introduced to... Electricity!!!"

u/ArgentStonecutter [+2] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (19 hours later)

I thought that the OP was more along the lines of "what magic would still leave you with a society that wasn't massively different from the typical medieval-ish fantasy setting".

Let's assume the background is Standard Medievalish Fantasyland but with slight urbanization or modernization being okay, so long as the Industrial Revolution doesn't start.

So you can change the society, but you can't immediately kick off a Magicotechnical Revolution. Would Medieval France + Illusions be substantively different from Medieval France - Illusions? Having to tap a coin against an anvil or cross or whatever to see if it turns into an acorn wouldn't be any different from demanding payment in good honest Florins instead of those debased Guilders that Prince Humperdink has been putting out.

u/DaystarEld [+2] Pokémon Professor (19 hours later)

As /u/argentstonecutter said, I think the OP is asking a very different question: what magics wouldn't utterly change or distort a society's tapestry, not if introduced "in canon," but introduced from our understanding of it without the magic. By simply being present and accounted for.

Basically there is a bad-writing-trope where writers will imagine a world, stick some magic or powerful tech into it, then utterly fail to take into account how intelligent applications of those things would break that society or completely change it from what's expected. I believe /u/eliezeryudkowsky is basically asking "what are magics that can be present in a given society/setting, like a medieval Europe expy, without making them unrecognizable when intelligently written?"

u/Xtraordinaire [+2] Team Glimglam (22 hours later)

Depending on what you mean by "faster" botany magic has an immense potential of breaking society. Cheap food? Yes please, modern era here we come! If creating invasive species of plants becomes too easy, continent-wide ecological disaster becomes imminent.

u/DaystarEld [+2] Pokémon Professor (23 hours later)

To be honest, most fantasy kind of requires a suspension of disbelief when it comes to a lot of what we consider mundane details of living in a pre-modern world, not to mention population and resource logistics. Cities with even a hundred thousand people, let alone multiple cities with hundreds of thousands, were practically nonexistent, and even rich kingdoms with arable climates had to devote hundreds of miles of land between cities to farming just to maintain their population. Any food more luxurious than bread or rice and stew would be almost unheard of for the vast majority of the population, and the amount of time the average person had to spend worrying about food opposed to doing "basic" other things like learning to read is almost completely ignored. Not to mention how prevalent and crippling the multitude of physical ailments and diseases were.

Magic botany would go a long way toward increasing the standard of living and population sizes from "realistic medieval" to what we might consider "standard fantasy" in any given story with that setting. Whether it accelerates things to the modern era or not I think is a different question: certainly it makes it easier to reach it, but the presence of other threats (say, roaming packs of goblins or magical creatures making life or trade difficult and requiring resources devoted to protection) would be a separate obstacle to offset the ease of acquiring food.

u/PlaneOfInfiniteCats [+1] (3 days later)

I agree with regard to "absolute" magic.

However, I think you severely underestimate the effects of your examples.

Botany magic means world hunger will be solved. Pretty revolutionary, if you ask me.

Illusion of you not being where you are is equivalent to invisibility. That's also a pretty big deal, I'd say.

But the greatest magic in your list is telepathy. It changes the society completely. No more secrets. Thought crimes are now detectable, provable and punishable. Betrayal is obsolete. Bluff is obsolete. Lie is obsolete. Really, telepathy would undermine entire human society and turn it unrecognizable.

u/DaystarEld [+1] Pokémon Professor (3 days later)

I don't think Botany magic has to mean an end to world hunger if it's rare and limited enough an ability. Again, just do what we do with modern science, but magically. Have we ended world hunger? No, largely for socio-economic reasons.

Invisibility is nice, but it's not foolproof. Remember, this is not a power dumped on an unsuspecting world, but one that was there all along. Any location with info or people important enough for an invisible person to drastically change things should have countermeasures in place to protect against it.

And telepathy can work on a projection principle rather than a "pry the thoughts from your mind" one. Or maybe people can learn defenses to it. Remember that any power is only as broken as its lack of limits.

u/PlaneOfInfiniteCats [+1] (3 days later)

Botany: we didn't end world hunger, but some of our crops give 10x yield compared to 19-th century crops. That's really big, actually. Also, the thing with botany that's broken is seeds. Most spells must be recast to give effect, potentially limiting them. Once you successfully make super-wheat with botany powers, you are done. It will spread by seeds. No need to put continuous magical effort. I would be careful when writing about innovative druids, they can easily shatter a story.

I agree with your points regarding the illusions and telepathy. Also, telepathy based on projection principle is guaranteed to be safe. After all,we already have it and it broke nothing. We call it "speaking".

However, I think your answer with regard to telepathy and illusions boils down to "any magic can be sufficiently nerfed to prevent it from shattering the plot". THis is true, but not that interesting. I would rather think of types of magic that would not shatter the plot even if not nerfed at all.

u/DaystarEld [+2] Pokémon Professor (3 days later)

True, if the plants don't need magic to maintain then it could lead to a more widespread shift. Maybe there's a faction of citizens and noblemen who are against any MMOs (magically modified organisms), the former for religious reasons and the latter for control.

After all,we already have it and it broke nothing. We call it "speaking".

Being able to speak to anyone in private in any circumstance is fairly useful. The addition of being able to speak to people of any language, or even animals depending on how we define "projection," could make a psychic a very prized individual to have.

This is true, but not that interesting. I would rather think of types of magic that would not shatter the plot even if not nerfed at all.

For this particular "prompt" that's the ideal, but overall I think the limitations of magic are just as fun to think up, and just as important to creative design and application, for stories.

u/Rhamni [+10] Aspiring author (2 hours later)

The kind of ghosts you get with fraudster psychics. Think about it. A real human mind able to move without its body could upset world politics and economics, but if these ghosts lost their ability to plan, learn or even reason, and only went around telling loved ones everything will be well and that they are loved, that... wouldn't change much. A lot of people already believe in this, and yet there haven't exactly been a lot big projects trying to revolutionize 'parapsychology'. Although I guess there were a few during the Cold War... Still, that's most of history after the industrial revolution passing by without ghost studies.

u/MugaSofer [+2] (23 hours later)

The Cold War studies were mostly focused on looking for out-of-body experiences and psychic powers, too, not ghosts. Stuff you can use for intelligence-gathering.

Theoretically there's no reason you couldn't call up an enemy soldier who's been recently killed, I suppose. But it's probably easier to interrogate flesh-and-blood prisoners.

u/Roxolan [+2] Head of antimemetiWalmart senior assistant manager (2 days later)

A lot of people already believe in this, and yet there haven't exactly been a lot big projects trying to revolutionize 'parapsychology'.

Belief In Belief, the lack of overlap between influential pragmatics and believers in the supernatural (often because it doesn't work, of course), and evolved defense mechanisms by the belief ("it stops working if you doubt / if you're doing it for profit" etc.).

u/None [+8] (11 hours later)

Friendship.

u/QWieke [+8] (26 minutes later)

Health/medical magic that doesn't work for indefinite life extension.

Eh, I'm pretty sure that any medical magic, even if it just gave this medieval society access to the equivalent of current day medical technology, would be pretty damn revolutionary, it doesn't have to be indefinite life extension. If the child mortality gets reduced family size can be reduced allowing parents to invest more into each child which ends up effecting pretty much everything in society.

---

Anyway regarding non revolutionary magic. I'm not sure if such a thing can exists, the mere existence of magic ought to revolutionize our understanding of the world. Even if the magic only allows us to do things we are already capable of through mundane means but at a far greater cost, it would still be a worthwhile field of study with who known what kind of ramifications.

Though the first thing that comes to mind, if I recall correctly, is early Discworld books magic which by magical law can never be any more efficient or cost effective than a mundane approach, kinda cheating.

Second thing is the fey magic in Tad William's War of the Flowers, where the magical fey society somehow only manages to become a slightly outdated equivalent of human society. Though I don't remember if this was just due to some kind of societal inertia, or creative sterility on part of the fey, or some cosmic/magical law that states that the mundane human and magical fey worlds need to be reflections of one another.

u/Tressillian [+7] (28 minutes later)

I see a difficulty in the presentation of the problem. Is magic merely a sufficiently advanced technology, or is it a physics breaking phenomenon? Physics breaking, in any form, is likely an economic unbalancing.

For example. A person who can cast magic missile is potentially creating energy from nothing. With enough time and ingenuity, there will be infinite energy. Infinite energy means infinite matter and the ability to create whatever you want. No economy.

The counter-argument to your 100 virgins for a gate is that a village of 50 people would never pay that price. So, cost is always the limiting factor. There must be a price for everything. Conservation must hold.

The economic breaking aspects of magic are almost entirely tied to breaking the law of conservation. There lies the question/secret. What is the cost of a super-power?

u/Transfuturist [+10] Carthago delenda est. (33 minutes later)

A person who can cast magic missile is potentially creating energy from nothing. With enough time and ingenuity, there will be infinite energy.

I want to see a story where widespread use of magic missile leads to catastrophic global warming in the medieval period. "Energy can only be created, not destroyed."

u/ulyssessword [+13] (an hour later)

The sun is shining on Earth gives about 2x10^17 watts. Humanity's total energy consumption is about 2x10^13 watts. The sun accounts for 99.99% of the energy going in to the Earth.

Human energy use isn't (directly) an issue until you start seriously looking at the Kardashev Scale of civilizations.

u/EliezerYudkowsky [+10] Godric Gryffindor (42 minutes later)

Global warming only happens because CO2 changes the energy-in/energy-out balance, not because we're burning things and generating heat (that part is trivial).

u/Transfuturist [+10] Carthago delenda est. (47 minutes later)

Spells that create energy ex nihilo increases energy-in, and the rate of their use then affects the rate of energy gain/loss. If the rate of spells produces heat faster than radiative cooling can disperse it, wouldn't ubiquitous spell use cause warming?

u/davidmanheim [+10] (56 minutes later)

Not at a rate that would matter. You need to change the multipliers to have any significant effect, and even then it only really matters if you can change them by a large amount, or if there are feedback loops being disrupted.

u/Transfuturist [+2] Carthago delenda est. (58 minutes later)

Not at a rate that would matter.

I question that 'matter.' What rate would matter? We're talking on a scale of millennia here.

u/psychothumbs [+18] (an hour later)

I have a hard time imagining a scenario where it would be a big deal. Think about the number of atomic bombs that have gone off in the last century. They produced a lot of heat, but even all put together did not raise average temperatures on Earth at all. The fact that their energy comes from splitting atoms rather than from nowhere doesn't really enter into it. Earth is not a closed system. Huge amounts of energy are being added from the sun all the time. No fantasy world I've seen produces energy on a scale that would hold a candle to that energy input.

u/davidmanheim [+3] (an hour later)

For human adaptation, if it takes millennia to change noticeably, it's not relevant; people just go elsewhere, or build differently, etc. The problem for humanity is caused by having too little time to adapt, and too fragile systems.

u/Norseman2 [+5] (3 hours later)

Right, at the moment the amount of energy being generated and consumed by mankind is four orders of magnitude less than the amount of energy delivered to Earth through sunlight. However, if we were using enough magic missiles to produce enough heat to be within an order of magnitude of the amount of energy that Earth receives from the sun, we might have problems with overheating.

u/Geminii27 [+2] (10 hours later)

Heh. People using magic missile for absolutely every trivial task.

u/Norseman2 [+3] (11 hours later)

I attack the darkness!

u/DrunkenQuetzalcoatl [+3] (47 minutes later)

Isn't the problem with global warming that we are trapping the energy on earth and not that we are releasing so much of it?

u/Transfuturist [+1] Carthago delenda est. (52 minutes later)

That's the difference between increasing energy-in rate and decreasing energy-out rate. The change is the same sign. What I'm saying is that if spells are energetic enough, widespread use will cause a serious threat. Although I don't think it even has to increase energy, just non-potential energy on the surface.

u/EliezerYudkowsky [+15] Godric Gryffindor (an hour later)

What you're missing is that absent something like CO2, heat radiation rapidly scales with temperature, so that higher energy input creates a new equilibrium that's only very very slightly higher. It doesn't matter whether you run a thousand nuclear power plants for 10 years or 10,000,000 years, the temperature rises infinitesimally and then stays there.

u/Transfuturist [+4] Carthago delenda est. (7 hours later)

Oh, thanks. I should have just looked up the dependence relation for radiative cooling, then.

u/murbard [+2] (2 hours later)

Like the 4th power of temperature, but that's in a vacuum. The greenhouse effect likely changes that relationship.

u/philip1201 [+3] (a day later)

The earth is in a vacuum. The greenhouse effect does affect the relationship, and it was never fully accurate for the Earth to begin with, because atmospheric gases and the surface of the earth itself refect and absorb different parts if the specturm, making absorption/emissivity a function of wavelength, while the fourth power law assumes a uniform distribution.

u/ArgentStonecutter [+16] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (16 minutes later)

Even if you don't allow magics that trigger technological revolutions, technological revolutions happen anyway. Society is never stable. OK, we've just invented magical teleport gates. For a while they're going to be rare, so you can put your story in the transition period. Or you can nerf the gates:

• They're permanent but still require maintenance. That maintenance costs a lot of time and money. If you don't maintain the gate, it starts randomizing things that go through.
• They're permanent but decay. Everything that goes through the gate shrinks it, just a little. Old gates are no more than a few centimeters wide, and are telegraphs or mail slots.
• They're permanent and stable, but the first gate in a region makes it harder to set up more gates. After a while you can't set up any more gates. Some places are gateless because saboteurs set up a bunch of short hop gates that are just as much of a problem as longjump ones. Other places are stuck with gates to places that are no longer worth traveling to.
• They're permanent and stable, but they interfere with each other. After a while you have too many gates in an area, and you can't rely on them, you come out the wrong place, or don't come out at all. You end up with expanding "dead patches" that you can't gate into surrounded by newer still-reliable gates outside the interference limit.

But "small magics"?

• Magic that enhances the flavor of food. Other mild sensory enhancements and euphorics.
• Magic that glues things together, not too strongly. It does make cloth stronger, and it's useful for putting up notices. You can't use it to climb walls... it's a permanent attraction between two objects, not a "sticky pad".
• Magic that pushes things apart, not too strongly. You can use it to improve bearings, but it's not strong enough to make a hoverboard.
• Magic that sets the state of an object and lets you reset it to that state. Then you have to cast it again. There's limits to how much change it can reset, and how often it can be done, and it doesn't work on living things... but you cast it on new clothes and take them to a magical laundry to make it "like new" again. Also great for secret messages.

u/Transfuturist [+17] Carthago delenda est. (29 minutes later)

I call small magics cantrips. I think that's how it's used contemporarily, right?

u/ArgentStonecutter [+9] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (36 minutes later)

Cantrip originally was just another word for spell, or for a trick or scam. Cantrips as "small spells" first showed up, as far as I can recall, in recent fantasy. It was popularized in a "Dragon" article introducing "small spells" for D&D.

u/Roxolan [+1] Head of antimemetiWalmart senior assistant manager (2 days later)

It's also game slang for spells that give you back the resources they consume. E.g. in card games, spell cards that make you draw a card (in addition to some effect). Originally from MtG, inspired by D&D.

Fortunately, for balance reasons, those spells typically have minor effects, so the two definitions usually converge.

u/Chosen_Pun [+13] The Chosen Ones (6 hours later)

Magic that enhances the flavor of food. Other mild sensory enhancements and euphorics.

Britain finds a more convenient alternative to the spice trade, declines to attempt world conquest.

...I'd read it.

u/Tehino [+1] (3 days later)

Resetting the state of an object could work on food. Eat the potato, wait for it to go through your digestive tract and reset it. Could perhaps result in horrible internal bleeding if potato parts have become human parts, but if it only works on non-living things I guess you could get back the parts of the potato that didn't become human bits.

u/ArgentStonecutter [+1] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (3 days later)

It would depend on what the magic considers "an object". To make it a proper cantrip, it could be limited to being able to undo only a certain amount of change.

u/BekenBoundaryDispute [+6] (56 minutes later)

Turning humans into other animals, assuming:

• Vertebrates only. Cell cultures do not count.
• The process is somewhat difficult, and to do so requires sympathetic items of the target, several minutes of preparation, direct visual contact and/or ingestion of a substance, and the sacrifice of a healthy individual of the chosen species.
• The target does not retain any of the knowledge, goals, or personality of their original form.
• The transformed target starts out proportionately satiated and aged to the original human form.
• The process can be reversed. This requires equivalent preparation to the initial transformation. The target retains the experiential memories of being transformed, but through the perspective of the target species. Interpreting this is a hard process which takes several years of training, and is roughly like learning to control a limb after moderate brain damage. Difficulty is proportional to genetic distance from humans.
• There is a significant "recovery time" which is equivalent to suffering mild trauma.
• You can only choose a species, and have no control over the exact appearance of the chosen form. The appearance varies with each transformation.
• While transformed, the target has the metabolism, vitality, and lifespan of the chosen species. Injuries and aging sustained while transformed carry across proportionately and to developmentally analogous anatomy.

This is not too distant from examples encountered in literature and folklore.

u/hoja_nasredin [+8] Dai-Gurren Brigade (an hour later)

I like it. In old russian tales werewolves were actualy wizards that knew how to turn into an animal.

I believe even a transformation that retains knowledge will change little in a society. (IMO the way you made your spell is just a more fancy way to torture/kill someone, totaly worthless, I don't see its long time effects on a society)

This ability would be helpful while obtaining food from a forest so only useful in small villages, not impacting the develpment of the setting. Other then that it can be a powerful weapon in time of war, It would make melee more deadly so giving lot of possibilities on how warfare changed to fight agaisnt such beasts, without revolutionazing the same way gusn did. In the form of a bird it can be used to spy, which will lead to paranoia towards animals (religious fanatics that want to kill ALL Vertebrates, vegans on steroids)

u/BekenBoundaryDispute [+3] (a day later)

Retaining human cognition effectively gives you a way to very simply super-domesticate anything. This gives us:

• Warfare changes drastically as you can use elephants as combat engineers. Castles are no longer viable. Riderless horses can trek across vast steppes, making logistics much simpler. The Mongol-equivalents find it even easier to steamroll civilizations than in OTL.
• Access to the seas and oceans allows for entirely new forms of infrastructure and warfare. Aquaculture is entirely feasible, gives access to rich fertilizers, and encourages further marine exploitation. Whales with pikes are left as an exercise to the reader.
• Turn your most of your serf population into ground squirrels and have them hibernate for the winter! (This one is actually possible even without retaining human intelligence, but making them easier to corral might make the difference in terms of utility.)

...off the top of my head.

u/hoja_nasredin [+2] Dai-Gurren Brigade (a day later)

Awesome...

I guess there must be a restriction to turn people back human after some time, or it would get really wierd very fast...

If you can chose to an animal to stay for long periods, would you end up chosing always humans?

u/aeschenkarnos [+2] (5 hours later)

Perhaps this could be part of the unexplored backstory of the film The Lobster?

u/mrmonkeybat [+1] (6 hours later)

I would also add, the target must remain the same mass.

u/hoja_nasredin [+7] Dai-Gurren Brigade (an hour later)

Spells that shift/move elemetns. "This rock will now form a wall" The level of detail remains pretty rough, so yo wouldn't use it for statues or similia but only for buildings.

Since cost of building lowers people are ready to abbandon cities more often creating various ghost cities dungeons that adventurers might end up exploring.

u/MugaSofer [+6] (2 hours later)

Water purification (a standard Cleric spell) would impact the alcohol industry (beer and wine), but relatively little else.

Some kind of personal invulnerability shield would probably do OK, as long as it's rare enough to be limited to a few specific individuals.

A spell to summon diseases or plagues.

Any spell that creates a human, or a humanlike creature, to order - or with specific properties, like a demonic self-serving adviser -could probably be tailored so as to be similar to simply hiring someone from the existing labour pool. (Requires expensive materials, can't produce people who are too exceptional/impressive, random component etc.)

An "evil genie" mind control/reading spell, as an analogy for torture. You'd need to make it costly enough, obviously, but torture is already a thing. (We can say with reasonable confidence, looking at history, that it would be implemented in an incredibly slapdash and irrational manner by almost everyone, so that's nice.)

Healing spells would have huge effects, honestly. You've got the ability to cure STDs; you've got reliable medical care for the rich (where before they had only quacks and charlatans, pretty much); you've got unknown and as-yet unmeasured effects on intelligence, political views, and God only knows what else from growing up with lower parasite load ... actually, that might explain the usual tendency for pseudo-medieval worlds to be populated by pseudo-modern people, with sexual equality and such.

The standard D&D raise dead, where it can't raise those killed by old age and requires 5,000gp worth of diamonds or whatever, is probably fine.

I'm not certain, but I think a Perpetual Light AKA lightbulb spell wouldn't break anything important.

Any kind of "illusion" spell with purely entertainment/data visualization applications, like a spell that shapes smoke or fire into particular forms.

Magical refrigeration.

Indestructible artifacts, one-ring style. A sword forged from Adamantium or a Mithril jacket isn't going to have much economic impact.

u/EliezerYudkowsky [+11] Godric Gryffindor (3 hours later)

Perpetual Light doesn't break the world, I agree, but in fact limelights were a pretty big deal during the industrial revolution - if you can run a factory with valuable machinery at night, you've multiplied the value of the capital equipment in it by a factor of two.

u/TheImmortalLS [+1] (10 hours later)

But that was back then. Nowadays our perpetual lights are mobile lights

We probably have to feed energy as in mana oh something to make sure it doesn't generate infinite energy. Then only benefits would be lack of wiring and space, and possibly lack of heat if we avoid the second law of thermo

u/SvalbardCaretaker [+8] Mouse Army (2 hours later)

A water cleansing spell would be HUGE. You get much higher population density much earlier, which can kickstart industrialisation much earlier.

u/EliezerYudkowsky [+9] Godric Gryffindor (3 hours later)

Remember, the way a Malthusian equilibrium works, removing 'dying of plague' doesn't mean a corresponding number of people live, it means they die of hunger instead.

u/Izeinwinter [+1] (24 days later)

This isn't actually universally correct - quite a few places have more than enough primary biological productivity to support very high population densities, but also a disease burden too high to allow urban centers to form in the pre-modern era. So magics that countered that burden would alter the pattern of global urbanization in the pre-modern age very dramatically. Far more great cities in the tropics.

u/Reasonableviking [+4] (3 hours later)

Actually indestructible stuff would be pretty cool, the latest chapters of Dungeon Keeper Ami have small plates of adamantium which hold up massive flywheels (with adamantium bases) that can keep spinning to produce huge mechanical force, for a railway in the story, so you never know what making something indestructible can actually do till you give it a good long think.

u/MugaSofer [+3] (23 hours later)

Yeah, it would have some very interesting effects once the Industrial Revolution hit.

u/TheImmortalLS [+3] (10 hours later)

I'd sure love water purification in our world...

If it always existed, we probably would be disease free but not know why, in the same way we knew contaminated water caused sickness but not why (bacteria)

u/LiteralHeadCannon [+6] (4 hours later)

Magic that grants power to the users but has a cost measured in sanity. Someone rational can't really make much use of it, unless they think they can hit an optimal point where the sanity loss isn't too bad. Forcing other people to use it is pointless, because they become powerful and therefore can't be controlled. The only rational thing to do with it is try to stamp it out.

u/Psy-Kosh [+6] (6 hours later)

That would be world breaking in a more literal way: The most (magically) powerful beings around are the most insane. This would not be conductive toward, well, good things.

u/None [+6] (5 hours later)

Any magic with a co-introduction of sufficient counterbalancing. While this could be an intrinsic limiter to the magic itself (e.g. costs years of your lifespan), it could also be a second magic. This would circumvent your limitation clause, though add a conditional one.

The nature of the interaction between a proactive magic and its counterbalance is interesting. The counterbalance needs to be intrinsically more powerful than the proactive magic unless that magic is not that powerful (such as Yudkowsky's destructive magic example). The reason for this is that an option introduced, no matter how weak, is strictly a buff. Even if a counterbalance works 100% of the time you've still given people an option they didn't have before given isolation from counter-mechanism. If I cast bull’s strength and any person who sees it can purge it at will, I'm still a more effective laborer in my own time, or among cooperative people. There's no drawback to bull's strength, even if it's ineffective in combat. Conversely, invisibility vs. an AoE negation gives the potential for punishment, which, depending on the method of delivery, could limit the practical application of invisibility to honest work (hunting for instance), a non-impact.

Generalising from here, I think that any magic that produces value without pissing someone off is difficult to counterbalance using the introduction of a second magic.

u/DrunkenQuetzalcoatl [+5] (23 minutes later)

What kinds of magic can you introduce into a setting without completely upsetting everything?

can have been in the hands of thousands of people for hundreds of years without implying an industrial or post-industrial society.

Do you mean by "upsetting everything" radical change or specifically radical change in a good direction?

And is means of getting/inheriting etc part of this question?

I can think of a few magics which would prevent the enlightenment or even undo it.

For example hereditary super speed/reflexes like in Naruto (even without ninjutsu) would render guns worthless as equalizer.

Supernatural things in general would make the clergy more of a problem.

And a Interdict of Merlin amped up to 11 would blur ALL written things.

u/derefr [+12] (39 minutes later)

Presumably, "radical change" means the carefully-crafted story setting falling apart and turning into something else too quickly to tell the story, or to leave open the possibility for telling further stories in that canon.

Naruto's world definitely has one of those "settings that would fall apart", as demonstrated in The Waves Arisen: someone sufficiently motivated to "just put together what's in front of them"—without any novel research or large-scale engineering!—could completely reshape the Naruto world into something that's worthless for telling stories about ancient clans having Ninjutsu battles.

Any setting that has an "eschaton" event in the story is one where eschatons are already really quite easy to trigger, in the same sense that memorized spells in D&D are quite easy to trigger—almost all the work of "casting" the spell has already been done. Neon Genesis Evangelion in all of its incarnations demonstrates this quite well: the story is basically about the protagonists trying to avoid an eschaton that really, really wants to happen. Through the various media, the heroes repeatedly start it up accidentally in different ways, and then have to clean up the mess.

I'm not as sure about eschaton events that aren't exactly due to power 'harnessable' by any mere human. Chrono Trigger's apocalypse-event is pretty easy for various parties (Queen Zeal; Magus) to trigger, but it's more the kind of "trigger" that involves prodding a paperclip-maximizer to get on with its paperclip-maximizing already. It's really only the paperclip-maximizer itself that has enough power to destabilize the setting, and it gets to "decide" the rules for what will or won't set it off, based on its own goal-tree. Unlike Evangelion's Instrumentality, you can't really predict Lavos as if it were a law of physics, which means you can't really harness Lavos to your own ends (as Queen Zeal found out.) It's less "nuclear bomb" and more "evil god."

And, to emphasize the point of the linked article: reality is a really good example of something that won't fall apart very easily. If it was easy enough to create e.g. grey goo that can unilaterally outcompete all other life, nature would have already happened onto the formula and we wouldn't be here. Every low-level phenomenon we study in labs is already happening (or has already happened) somewhere in the universe by pure chance; every particle we produce in particle accelerators has likely already been produced. We're not going to blow up the world just by making a new one. We might blow up the world by a concentrated effort to apply those principles—plutonium decays in the Earth's crust all the time, but never in concentrations enough for supercriticality—but it's infinitesimally unlikely that there's anything laying around our universe that we might accidentally "activate" to our doom.

(Unless, that is, it was built by some other sentient race, who "cast the spell" for us. I feel increasingly wary of the idea of life being possible in a universe that doesn't necessitate the Fermi paradox; imagine if, ala 2001, there really were precursor-race artifacts left laying around for cavemen to find.)

u/None [+5] (13 hours later)

[deleted]

u/derefr [+3] (a day later)

I agree; it's often linked to to serve as an expression of the idea by people who faintly remember it but haven't actually given it a re-read recently. Unfortunately, I was just such a person.

If anyone wants to write a more pithy and storycraft-oriented version of the above, I imagine it'd become quite popular ("viral", even) in writers' circles.

I have a feeling that either Stephen King or Brandon Sanderson may have already done so—just due to their particular oeuvres—but I can't recall any specific time either of them mentioned "setting stability" as a concern in worldbuilding. Looking at the Writing Excuses archives (a podcast on writing which Sanderson is a part of), I do see these, which sound like they're on the right track, but might not actually go anywhere near "stability" as a concern:

• Writing Excuses 4.21: Writing Practical Fantasy
• Writing Excuses 4.30: Worldbuilding the Future
• Writing Excuses 6.13: World Building Communications Technology

u/lextramoth [+1] (a day later)

Yes. It started out as an interesting, but disappointing (didnt deliver the promise of the title), and then went into bullshit biblical theories and prophesies..

u/mycroftxxx42 [+4] (an hour later)

Basically, any magical system that, when thought through, generates at least one Henderson-value's worth of disruption to its own setting.

u/EliezerYudkowsky [+7] Godric Gryffindor (an hour later)

If it was easy enough to create e.g. grey goo that can unilaterally outcompete all other life, nature would have already happened onto the formula and we wouldn't be here.

(The reason why molecular-nanotech grey goo doesn't happen accidentally is that proteins, which must be evolvable out of other proteins by mistake, are held together by weak van der Waals forces rather than covalent bonds. This is why steel and diamond are so much stronger than bone, but don't get used in the body. Nanotech grey goo is to bacteria what diamond is to flesh. But your logic holds for grey goo that was made from amino-acid-chain folding proteins.)

u/Reasonableviking [+9] (an hour later)

That's not entirely true, first Proteins are held together with covalent bonds, ionic interactions, van der Waals forces and even steric effects (their shape prevents them from unfolding in certain ways). Secondly the idea that proteins are less strong than steel because they are made with covalent bonds suggests you haven't been looking at spiders and their silk very closely. Thirdly I don't know on what scale you think Nanotech is but anything smaller than a protein seemingly can't be specific enough to do anything to other molecules in a controlled way, not to say it's impossible but it's also not magic. Finally why was your entire comment in parenthesis?

u/derefr [+5] (2 hours later)

Finally why was your entire comment in parenthesis?

I think because it's meant as a clarification rather than a rebuttal.

u/derefr [+6] (2 hours later)

Right, I more meant to imply that none of the chemistry that goes on on Earth—organic or inorganic—has any simple route to building a parallel evolutionary process for molecular nanotechnology. So you'll never "stumble onto" grey goo by throwing chemicals together in a lab. It'd take extensive R&D to develop grey goo.

I don't mean to imply that it would take Manhattan Project levels of R&D, though. It's possible that grey goo is something that someone living in 2050 could solve the engineering challenges for in their basement over the course of a few years—somewhat like the most scary hypotheticals for uFAI. But it's not just sitting there as a corner-case in chemistry, the way an energy virus would be a corner-case in quantum physics. There's no single misstep we could make that would result in grey goo. It'd have to be a large number of missteps. (Or a single misstep at the very end of the path to some useful technology that happens to be 99% similar to grey goo.)

u/JanRz [+3] (3 hours later)

You need to have weak forces if you want your replicator to replicate. Covalent bonds are strong and have huge energy barriers, operating on them means massive energy losses. Bones are great, having steel parts would mean you need huge amounts of rare iron and diamonds are thermodynamically unstable.

u/ctulhuslp [+2] (2 hours later)

About Narutoverse: for change to happen, there had to be enough advancements in different fields for big reshaping to happen. It's just that it was already done by the time of the story. Clans studying their bloodlines, mages improving techniques, attempts to figure out history...basically, all that standing on shoulders of giants thing holds true.

u/lextramoth [+1] (a day later)

You should remove the link. It isnt relevant. It doesnt do what the title say, it is religious rambling.

Edit: added the obvious missing not

u/derefr [+1] (2 days later)

Done (with sadness in my heart.) You'd think Phillip K. Dick would know a thing or two about setting design, but he clearly doesn't want to spell it out.

u/protagnostic [+4] (an hour later)

Dragon Ball style resurrection, i.e. anyone can be brought back to life, but only once per person, and it takes a significant effort to bring someone back. It may be possible to revert to a younger age, but this is also a one-time deal, and old age still eventually gets you.

Because this is effortful, it will largely be used on high-value individuals (e.g. beloved leaders) or by individuals with lots of resources to expend on acquiring the necessary materials (e.g. oligarchs). Because it can happen only once per person, you don't get immortal god-kings (although you probably get a lower net rate of social change, since the most powerful members of the old generation take longer to die off).

u/protagnostic [+2] (an hour later)

Oh, you already said "health/medical magic that doesn't work for indefinite life extension". I need to read things more closely.

u/mack2028 [+5] (20 hours later)

The magic from discworld, it obeys a law called "conservation of effort" which states that you can only get from magic what you could have gotten without it using the same effort, so you can get money by using alchemy but only as much as you could have gotten working the same amount of time. It makes magic pretty versatile, since you can use it instead of a whole bunch of other skills, but it isn't a significant difference.

u/Takashoru [+1] (17 days later)

Yes, but that's a kind of tongue-in-cheek shorthand answer that isn't really very satisfying to a rationalist.

u/mack2028 [+1] (17 days later)

That is the thing, discworld is explicitly made by a non-rational entity.

u/Takashoru [+1] (17 days later)

Well yes, but I think the question was more directed at magic systems that aren't tautologically low impact.

u/hoja_nasredin [+4] Dai-Gurren Brigade (an hour later)

Spells that give big personal power. So you won't try to tech them to populance and keep to yourself and few pupils.

Maybe somthing to cotrnol crowds, single people, change emotions, cange memories.

Maybe some magic that if given to pulation can be taken back...

u/BrainstormSurge [+9] (an hour later)

This would eventually lead to a magocracy like the Kirin Tor. That would certainly lead to a change in society and also economics. It may be too game changing and lead to a revolution. You should try to be more specific in the kind of personal power too.

You might argue that the personal power causes them to be hermits and thus it limits their impact, but everyone knows that anyone with power wants more. If it's their dogma to be hermits then it just takes one "heretic".

u/aeschenkarnos [+2] (5 hours later)

Maybe the more often a spell is cast, the less powerful it gets?

u/Cruithne [+5] Light Sith epistemologist (3 hours later)

The way bread is made via magic in the Discworld. It requires a lot of reagents and prep time. In the end, it's more or less the same as baking your own bread.

u/lehyde [+3] Nudist Beach (4 hours later)

Some weak mind magic that has the same effects as psychoactive substances (i.e. there is a spell with alcohol effect, one with SSRI effect, one with Modafinil effect) and requires the consent of the target and can't be cast on oneself. New spells have to be developed by tedious experimentation on a lot of test subjects.

The war on drugs would become an effort to contain the knowledge of the spells. Other effects would depend on how easy it is to learn a spell.

The requirement of consent seems necessary but maybe makes for a boring story. However, as I imagine it, you could still pretend to cast a different spell than you're actually doing.

u/Xtraordinaire [+2] Team Glimglam (43 minutes later)

Generally speaking, any magic with adequate costs. A properly gated magic system isn't going to revolutionize the world. Slowly evolve, yes, revolutionize: no.

The permanent virgin-powered Portal spell is not properly balanced because virgins are a dime a dozen. Ethics, of course, never comes into the equation. Likewise, typical Mana isn't a proper gating system because Mana is ambient and basically free.

But if you replace virgins with something worth 10xGDP of a typical nation, the gates suddenly won't be popping like mushrooms. Another common gamedesign trick is making each Portal price grow exponentially. When 10th Portal costs you 10^10 virgins, suddenly, you can't afford it until industrial cloning kicks in and at that point you can have maglev on every tile.

u/Psy-Kosh [+1] (6 hours later)

You have to be really picky re the "something" and what it is about the something that allows it to power a portal, else there's going to be munchkinry re finding alternatives that still have the same critical properties while being easier to obtain

u/protagnostic [+2] (an hour later)

The Force.

u/Reasonableviking [+2] (2 hours later)

Magical effects from the World of Darkness series of games and books etc. are protected from the most of society through a series of taboos mostly but also an incredibly powerful effect called The Veil which may or may not be maintained by Satan, it's a long and interesting story.

Those mages who have access to magic that is controllable in a very useful fashion, as opposed to Vampires and Werewolves whose magic is more inbuilt and generally very inflexible, have the common problem of spells that only work when you believe in them. The overarching plot of Mage:the Ascension is the idea that traditional Mages are being pushed into obsolescence by the Technocracy who are Mages that use super-science which is simply a different name for magic but who success allows the world to advance behind them and grow technologically.

So if you make magic harder the less plausible it is you also vastly reduce its effects on your setting by giving the setting primacy over magic rather than the other way round. World of Darkness's setting runs on the expectations of it's residents but only so far as the plot allows, I find it interesting to think about though.

u/Psy-Kosh [+3] (6 hours later)

If by "plausible", you mean specifically in terms of belief... the really obvious munchkining there is any form of mind control/self mind control/whatever that would allow direct editing of what one believes.

So long as one gain access to some means to do that, that pretty much gives them everything else then, no? (or did I misunderstand the model you haad in mind?)

u/Aabcehmu112358 [+2] Utter Fallacy (4 hours later)

A trivial case, sort of, would be anti-magic, or slightly more generally metamagic that only limits what the magic it's effecting can do.

u/None [+2] (4 hours later)

I think the wiki idea is great. I'd much prefer to discuss the limit of each magic before it is broken, rather than only those that are essentially limitless in this regard.

u/Petruchio_ [+2] (5 hours later)

Off the top of my head, magic which kills the wielder, causes terrible pain for their loved ones and/or the world at large. Demons, essentially.

Also, balance and karmatic retribution. I am thinking of Wildbow's story, Pact, where you could use magic to enhance your life, but the universe doesn't like that. You then need to balance the scales in some way or you find the universe literally conspiring against you.

u/Jiro_T [+3] (19 hours later)

Magic with any high cost can do this. It doesn't even have to be a personal cost. Imagine magic that only works if you use a rare resource, like meteoric iron, or some plant that is difficult to grow, or requires sacrificing a lion each time you use it.

u/DocFuture [+2] (5 hours later)

Anything that is uncommon, non-transferable (so it can't be appropriated by elites), and doesn't give a significant military advantage, won't necessarily revolutionize society. There are usually powerful forces that wish to maintain the status quo in a medieval setting, and "If I can't have it, and it doesn't protect you, you can't have it either" is not an uncommon motivation.

u/Drazelic [+2] Dai-Gurren Brigade (7 hours later)

So, I'm going to regret this, but hey, try to exploit this power.

You can transmute a volume of wood to an equal volume of rough-fired ceramic, and back. The object has to be lifted single-handedly, so that your arm is the only thing supporting the weight of the wood/ceramic, and the wood/ceramic has to be freefloating in air and not supported against gravity by any major forces other than your arm.

I honestly can't think of anything insanely clever to do with this. Make pots out of coconut shells??? Make neat looking wood objects by sculpting and then transmuting clay??? Some sort of... weapon that uses easily-replenished single-use ceramic blades, like obsidian-edged swords? Try to make money by transmuting wood to clay and then to really expensive wood (except that'd just crash the economy for expensive wood or expensive porcelain since lots of people can do it, and both of those things are just luxury materials for artwork anyways)???

Someone prove me wrong. There's PROBABLY something cool you can do with this but as far as I can think of, it's as innocuous a cantrip as it gets.

u/TheImmortalLS [+2] (10 hours later)

-Arm has to support

• reinforce arm

• can change wood to ceramic, reversible

• well, that's a change in hardness, so there might be something that can exploit that
• I wonder what ceramic can be used for, since we have lots of wood

u/Daerdemandt [+1] (3 days later)

transmute a volume of wood to an equal volume of rough-fired ceramic, and back

Wood density: ~0.5

Ceramic density: ~3-4

I guess if there's a rope attached to a thing to be transmuted but it slacks as you support the whole weight of a thing then magic works?

Say the ceramic thing weights 15 kg, that makes wooden thing around 2-3 kg.

12 kg of difference per thing.

If there's a big wheel with those thingies hanging from it and person at the bottom transmutes clay to wood, person at the top transmutes wood to clay and the wheel is given some initial spin - it will spin and will also be able to do some work.

It can be made to work without ropes either.

You'd need to set up some cooldowns so just making a big enough wheel would be unfeasible.

Also making ships would be easier: use thin layers of wet clay, make thin layers of wood with the curve you need, glue them together with fibers in neighbour layers at a right angle to each other. Interconnect layers in brick pattern. No need to grow special ship-building wood.

In fact, if you can cheaply make wet clay from thoroughly crushed wood-transmuted clay, you can now build a fleet from scrap wood.

Also what about reinforced wood/clay? Does it work? If it does not, soaking a piece of wood in salt water and wood -> clay -> wood makes non-salty wood? (pure water could be extracted by that, also useful for the fleet).

How versatile wood is? There definitely are some edible types.

If you are able to build a fleet using scrap wood / clay / seawater (what's the least expensive with your logistics) and give them source of food and pure water and an engine then you can have some maritime advancement.

u/ArgentStonecutter [+2] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (19 hours later)

Certain kinds of magic may actually lock society into the "Standard Medievalish Fantasyland" civilization.

See Brin's The Practice Effect for one example.

[ Reminded by this comment from /u/serge_cell ]

u/Transfuturist [+1] Carthago delenda est. (22 minutes later)

How about enchantments that only slightly improve the durability of materials? Cheap enough to use widely and a small advantage against those who don't have or use it, but it doesn't do much besides a constant factor for each material found. I think it would have a depressing effect long-term, as the constant factor would make the marginal gain in material progress smaller.

u/davidmanheim [+1] (28 minutes later)

Anything where the mental/physical cost of a spell is tied to the effort required to do it without magic. This is the standard out. It also allows the writer to have magic change in cost depending on setting, in a series spanning long time periods.

u/BrainstormSurge [+4] (34 minutes later)

That completely changes when someone discovers a way to harvest energy from another source, which is mundane and not arcane. For example: using magic to harvest solar energy or thermal energy. That would be an interesting setting for a story where the start of it introduces this and starts a revolution in magic and thus everything.

u/davidmanheim [+3] (45 minutes later)

Effort, not energy. HPMOR broke this with acorns, confusing the two. If you didn't allow such munchkin-ry, it could still work.

But your idea intrigues me...

u/BrainstormSurge [+1] (an hour later)

True that wouldn't make up for mental energy. I was thinking of the physical energy cost of things.

I got the idea from some fanfiction I've read but I've never seen anyone really explore the idea enough. For example, this guy used the thermal energy of a volcano to fuel a spell beyond his own arcane reserves. I'm sure it's nothing new and nobody could find where the idea first came from. However; it's never truly been fully exploited it its maximum in any media I've consumed yet.

u/luminarium [+1] (3 hours later)

thermal energy of a volcano

The Wiz Biz?

u/gerryblog [+1] (43 minutes later)

Short-duration, nonmaterial illusions. D&D had a category of spell called the "cantrip" that was pretty minimal-intervention magic. +1/-1-style weapons blessing and cursing.

u/None [+1] (an hour later)

Purely illusory magic (create prety pictures and lights) that is powerful enough for entertainment but nothing else,

u/BrainstormSurge [+2] (2 hours later)

I went into this already. There is much more to it than that. Even if it's just "pretty pictures."

u/qbolec [+1] (23 hours later)

I find TV and movies quite influential :)

u/Roxolan [+1] Head of antimemetiWalmart senior assistant manager (an hour later)

All kinds of illusion magic (if they can't pass for real, don't record information for very long durations, and don't produce enough light to read by). It allows wonderful works of art, and 3d movies better than anything we can do today, but that's all entertainment. Economic impact should be minor.

u/None [+4] (4 hours later)

It could also be used for obfuscation. You may be able to tell it's an illusion, but a concentrated effort by a group of individuals could easily create enough 'noise' to enact their devious goals. How much control do you have over it? You could plant illusions directly in front of people's faces, effectively rendering them blind. This would make it near impossible for honest business, increasing security costs and disincentivising productivity.

u/DrunkenQuetzalcoatl [+2] (an hour later)

That could be very helpful for education.

u/BrainstormSurge [+2] (2 hours later)

I've already posted this. I'm the first one to propose it so you could comment on that. I cover a lot more detail.

u/Roxolan [+1] Head of antimemetiWalmart senior assistant manager (14 hours later)

Apologies, I had not seen your post.

u/regula_et_vita [+1] (an hour later)

My best immediate thought is low-level illusion magic. I'd expand though on what some other users here have posted. Most low-tier illusion spells are, as they suggest, just temporary sensory trickery. Convincing someone that X is Y (or more Y-like than X-like, or at least one attribute's deviation toward Y from X), or that X has disappeared, etc. Potency-wise, I'm thinking even below the level where you can do full human transfiguration, so you wouldn't have to worry too much about someone, say, disguising themselves as royalty or nobility, or as a close servant, for purposes of espionage or assassination (even if we admit this, I'm assuming that, once everyone knows this kind of magic is possible, smarter people will engineer tests to filter out sneaky shapeshifters). Besides, I'd argue that it's not uniquely beneficial relative to the old-fashioned way, either in kind or in (significant) degree: illusion-enchanced trickery is, at the revolutionary level, essentially isomorphic (or homeomorphic and requiring very, very few adjustments) to just having a corrupt adviser, which is not all that uncommon a phenomenon for high-powered monarchs.

Beyond that, everything I imagine people would want from illusions--which arguably falls under "cosmetics"--is cripplingly temporary. So, you might be able to give the appearance of being unblemished, of having all your teeth, of being taller, etc. Except, you'd probably only get to have it for a few hours, and, given that you'd probably have to get it retail (since it is unlikely that anyone other than well-to-do merchants or nobility would have the requisite training to attempt to do it themselves), it would become prohibitively expensive very quickly to keep reupping on your beautifying spell so often, so I doubt it would amount to much beyond a luxury industry.

u/Jakkubus [+1] (2 hours later)

The best way to achieve it is introducing a magic system, that doesn't have permanent effects or even if it has, they are super-pricey. So powerful magician can for example teleport himself and others basically worldwide, but still cannot create stable portal between two neighbouring villages for too long.

u/luminarium [+1] (3 hours later)

Teleporting is still more of a game breaker than most abilities. I'd say astral projection.

u/Jakkubus [+1] (15 hours later)

Well, my point wasn't if something is game breaking or not, but if it can have big impact on entire society or not. Teleportation is indeed powerful thing, but if it cannot be common it wont affect lives of that many people as even short range stable portals.

u/Jiro_T [+1] (19 hours later)

Astral projection that works at a distance gives you long distance communication. This will be worse if the astral projection travels instantly, but as a reliable means of communication causes problems even if not.

u/Jakkubus [+1] (20 hours later)

So it could be even worse, since it would be easier than teleportation and thus more common, what certainly should have big economic impact and revolutionize society. While if teleportation is only in hands of the most powerful/wealthy ones, it wouldn't affect daily life of commoners and townsmen.

u/Luminnaran [+1] Prophet of Asmodeus (12 hours later)

Healing magic that simply transfers wounds or diseases to the spell caster, whatever the difficulty of casting the spell, would likely have very little effect on society as wizards would either be far to reluctant to use the ability or quickly get themselves killed healing others.

u/TimTravel [+1] (12 hours later)

Related

u/ArgentStonecutter [+1] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (13 hours later)

Another idea: magic that's got to be literally wound up, like a spring.

You have some kind of mechanism that converts mechanical energy into "mana" to power talismans. So let's say you create a permanent gateway between two places by physically placing "portal stones" at each end, but you have to have an ox in a treadmill walking in circles for six hours to charge the stone up up enough to send the same ox six miles... about half an ox's walking speed.

This would still be useful, but it wouldn't replace muscle-powered transportation except to bypass natural barriers, and it would be more useful to bypass rivers than mountain ranges. Not only is the distance shorter, but you could power the portal with a millwheel.

It would be a great communication tool, especially if light and sound could go through the portal... but even if it couldn't, you'd still be able to transfer paper cheaply in energy cost.

One huge difference would be defensive structures. Castles would have pairs of portal stones instead of gateways. If portals transmitted light, you'd eliminate windows as well.

Let's say instead of a portal you have a kinetic energy spell. You don't bother with bows and arrows, you carry an aiming stick and a bag of mana-charged sticks or rocks, and some kind of windlass to charge them up again between battles. Or maybe the magic is in the stick, like a magical railgun that works like a cross between a crossbow and a rifle. Bombs are bags of rocks with randomly directed impact-triggered kinetic spells on them. Shaped charges are easy.

Warfare is driven by windmills and waterwheels holding open portals to the front that charged weapons are delivered through. Rivers are a major strategic asset. Since one limit to portals is mass, there's a tendency to overcharge the goods. Sometimes there are terrible accidents...

u/serge_cell [+1] (13 hours later)

Any magic will completely change society as soon as scientific method widely spread. Even if the internal mechanics of magic is completely impenetrable the existence of it by itself will switch science, philosophy and by extension all the society in completely different direction. Think about it as singularity limited to low-dimensional subspace of society phase space

u/ArgentStonecutter [+1] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (19 hours later)

That might actually lock people into the "Standard Medievalish Fantasyland" situation.

Actually, that reminds me of something and I'll make a new top post about it.

u/qbolec [+1] (a day later)

If by magic we mean something against laws of physics as we know it, then I have some general ideas:

1. spells which give you a power which to others seems to be something one could achieve by other means. For example a power to stop procrastinating and focus on your goals. Or a power to arrive to correct conclusion from already held information.
2. spells which create something (for an appropriate price) which is not natural, but one could imagine a world with it. Like, a cloth in a completely new color. Or a brick made of completely new material, which behaves mostly like a clay brick, but is green. Or an animal which looks like a mix of cat and dog.
3. spells with a tricky feedback loop which causes them to not influence economy, for example a spell which gives you a sausage at the same time deducing one gold coin from your pocket and giving half of it to the closest butcher, quarter of it to the nearest postman, quarter of it to the bartender, and finally making the pig one ounce lighter, and you one hour older. In a way this would be like "fast forward one hour" spell.

u/sassafrassia [+1] (a day later)

Any sufficiently unadvanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.

Following this, any magical use that improves some aspect of life exactly as much as a technology, and that has its same flow-through effects and rough user experience, is indistinguishable from that technology.

u/TimTravel [+1] (a day later)

Something useful only for entertainment purposes would have only cultural impact, not economic or military. It's a starting point.

u/None [+0] (an hour later)

How would changing the fundamental laws of the universe ever have a low impact?

Thats kinda like asking for a version of quantum physics with super positions that doesn't make a interesting computer

u/None [+1] (3 days later)

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