The Birds and the Bees and the Biomodified...

...is going to be a full time job for the "youngsters," especially if the seniors just won't die. It's hard enough advancing in a career in RL when so many old people just won't retire gracefully. The hypercorps and other orgs are going to get top heavy with oldsters who won't shove off; the companies will get increasingly more conservative & less innovative, and youngsters will have to fight intense competition to get the increasingly fewer job openings.

I can imagine more than one disgruntled young Ego that becomes a serial killer of senior Egos (including all forks/backups). And when a youngster can't get a job, can't pay their bills, and has little hope of rising above their lower class station... well, with all that free time and nothing to lose, they are going to be very tempted to resort to violence.

i dont think theres any kind of immortality being offered by EP technology. sure you can jump to a new body, but essentially that involves nanites rebuilding the brain in the new body to exactly match all the various neruron interconnections in your old body.

memories and skills are not being copied over as individual blocks of data. its all being rewritten at the wetware level, and the exact workings of it are only partly understood (see the psychosurgery sections for exactly WHAT is understood).

so any mental trauma is caried over to your new body. any neurological damage will follow you. work in an industrial area, and fry some braincells huffing the fumes? when you transfer to a new morph that same brain damage will be coppied over.

im imagining old people being increasingly degenerate mental invilids. they wont die physically, but they'll linger on in a wretched state that is only a shadow of their former self. kinda like watching grandpa go, all those years ago.

sure lifespans should be longer, and mental health should be prolonged far past what is possible today. But i wouldnt expect any methuselahs to be wandering around the setting. at least not until psychosurgery gets better and the general tech level increases.

but whats job competition, anyway? what are jobs in the post-scarecity economies? there are as many jobs as people can think to create on their own. everything out on the rim is all e-hippy OSS anarchic paradise, so if someone wants to build rep they just find a project to contribute constructively to, or start a new one. its something i have a hard time reconciling, but that doesnt mean it isnt a hypothetical possibility.

I'd assume that they would create an AGI, and then socialize it as per normal. Another option would be an exowomb, but then they'd have to have life-support for organics etc. so that would probably not be done.

I honestly think that the questions of reproduction are the most fascinating thing in EP. I almost dread some canonical answer being unveiled by the publishers, as the discussions and musings about it are so fascinating and stimulating. everyone has such great ideas.

setting wise, infomorph habs should be able to just decant more infomorphs out of storage. there are supposed to be tons of them from earth that are sitting offline waiting for people to get around to booting them up and re-integrating them into society. probably this involves some sort of screening and testing to make sure its a real transhuman and not some sort of TITAN / Exurgant agent or databomb.

technology wise, infomorph reproduction isnt going to be like AGI reproduction. transhuman infomorphs basically run on "brain-emulators" which mimic the function of wetware. children basically start with single neurons that multiple and adapt to their growing sensory organs. brains are blank slates which dynamically adapt to their inputs, so the entire embrionic growth phase of the organism would have to be emulated at a celular level in the software.

this isnt impossible, but adult brain emulation probably is more about emulating neural pathway interconnections and not individual cellular data. attempts to do it with children at accelerated VR times resulted in the "Lost" generation. its reasonable to assume that other attempts are being made -- at least in simulation -- but that there are similar inscrutable roadblocks.

its also safe to assume that, since the Lost exhibit psy powers, that the experiments were corrupted by the exurgent virus and if a similar experiment was run on "clean" systems, there wouldnt be any problems.

This begs the question of wither or not there are any truely clean systems in the solar system, or if infomorph refugees from earth have spread contamination through all of transhuman civilization.

What about a weird version of forking and merging?

Let me explain...

Let's imagine a colony of infomorphs, where a couple (or maybe even more!) infos want to have "a baby". Let's say they both create very slim vapor forks with no skills and only very basic aptitudes, maybe picking their best aptitudes and also some emotional impulses and such. After creatings this very very slimmed down forks, they merge them to form a human consciousness different from both parents but also having some characteristics from both. It will also be a very "young" mind as it would be pretty much a black slate knowledge wise, as a child is.

Does this make sense?, would it be possible?