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Comment by Joeri | Hacker News Reader

Personally, I really liked altered carbon. The acting was good, the sets great, and the story intriguing. The show doesn’t go out of its way to surprise you like GoT, but it had enough mysteries and twists to keep things interesting.

The only lesser part for me wasn’t the story but the technology. I’m ok with unexplained advanced tech, but it has to make sense. Why are the only things run by advanced better-than-human AI’s hotels and brothels? Why is it so trivial to transfer minds between bodies but so difficult to make a simple backup? Why are prosthetic replacement arms so powerful they can crush metal, and why if that tech is available don’t the special ops use bodies which are all-prosthetic? Too many things didn’t make sense.

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I re-read the book a few weeks ago in anticipation of the series. The inconsistencies that you notice are real and present in the source material. I didn't notice them so much the first time I read the book 10+ years ago. The relentless action was fresh the first time around and helped paper over weaknesses in the logic of the world. Also I've apparently become less able to overlook internal inconsistencies with time.

The vast majority of SF uses technologies as cool set props for minor variations on familiar kinds of stories and social dynamics. Star Trek was/is terrible about this too. It's hard for a creator to model the higher-order effects that would be introduced from (e.g.) starships, teleporters, AI, or what-have-you. Do that hard work too well and most of the audience won't be able to understand what's going on without lengthy infodumps. The only current show I can think of that tries to show how technologies could drastically change societies is Black Mirror. Almost everything else is "familiar social dynamics, Amazing Gizmos are just props for the adventure." The proportion of internally consistent works is somewhat higher in written SF, but I'd say over half still follows the Amazing Gizmos Somehow Leave Society Basically Familiar template.

(Oh man, Star Trek... Artificial gravity that no one ever talks about. Gravity control would be a total game-changer.

Also, One day I realized, how does the Klingon disintegrator ray stop at the soles of the boots? It never disintegrates the floor.)

Ah, but it works the same way light sabers in StarWars shoot out super-focused light (in fact so focused that it acts as solid matter) and then suddenly terminates about a yard from the shaft.

I always understood lightsabers to be a force field confining plasma, with the plasma leaking through the force field, especially when the field is deflected by impact.

> Artificial gravity that no one ever talks about.

Much the same as how most people today don't talk about how 4G works, or how pressurisation on an airliner prevents them from asphyxiating. Until it stops working, like in Star Trek VI...

Yeah, but we mention 4G, pressurized cabins, what-have-you.

My point is that of all the futuristic fictional technologies that ST presents and deals with: teleporters, replicators, phasors, warp drive, etc... they never ever even mention the artificial gravity. (Spoiler alert: There is one part in one of the movies where the bad guys turn it off on a ship during an attack. But still no one actually talks about it.)

Arguably, gravity control would be a huge thing (Larry Niven has a book where one of the characters has developed g.c. and done spectacular things with it.)

To add to your list of questions,

Since it is so trivial to fake video evidence or transfer to a new body, why would a video confession have any value? And why on earth are their bank accounts DNA-locked when they can and do change bodies like they change cloths?

In the future so technologically advanced, why would a contract need to be physically printed and stamped?

Who holds the power in this universe? One episode Meths are gods, untouchable by mere mortals. The next, police show up and easily arrest not one, but two of them. One week a nobody can slaughter an entire clinic and walk away with impunity, the next a Meth is arrested for what can be arguably called a manslaughter, under influence no less. Who is the ultimate untouchable, Meths or CTAC? It seems it changes from episode to episode.

If people can live in the virtual, why wouldn't more people do so instead of simply dying? Living in the virtual should cost nothing or close to nothing. Why isn't everyone who can't afford a new body at the end of their natural lifespan simply move to virtual for the rest of eternity, or until they gather enough money for a new body?

I can go on and on. Nothing about the show made sense. The visuals were great, but everything else was terribly lacking.

We (wife and I) quit watching halfway through the second show. The plot didn't make sense.

Why would someone who is effectively immortal care if a body was destroyed?

Aside from "plot point", why was the update of the meth's upload 48 hours? Why not also local, and uploaded to the cloud?

For anyone who can upload, which seems everyone except Catholics (plot point), why can't people trade bodies as needed? 7 year old gets old person body - why can't they trade as needed?

And of course, add in the appropriate amounts of violence and "Game of Thrones" forced sexuality. I guess pandering to the masses is a thing. :/

There's a lot of internal inconsistency in the story but

Why would someone who is effectively immortal care if a body was destroyed?

Doesn't seem so weird. Bancroft has no memory of being in a suicidal frame of mind, he has a lot of enemies, and somehow his last body ended up destroyed with his own weapon inside his secure mansion. It doesn't matter that it's impossible to really end him by destroying that one body. It should have also been impossible for one of his enemies to destroy that one body in those circumstances. As long as Bancroft isn't convinced of the suicide or wife-did-it explanations he's going to care a lot about how that body ended up dead.

We already live in a world with cameras, microphones, and recorders of all sorts spooling data to the "cloud". And this futuristic world wants to sell me the idea that one of the richest families in the galaxy can't afford security that entails in recording all physical happenings that goes on in the house?

I don't accept that.

Sure, video can be forged or deleted. But we can even solve that by spooling to write-once read only systems. A dot matrix printer is an early form of that for Syslog. Hard for a hacker to 'hack' a printout. Or, in this case, whatever techno-magical hardware can be used.

And regarding killing his body and device, all he needs to do is increase the update frequency and make it realtime backup for his residence. Then, no mystery. He'd remember.

The last two bother me especially. Only thing I can think of is that bodies are expendable and for police that means good second skins, they get first or second dibs. No need for cyborg parts when blasters kick so much butt.

The stack backup reasoning is lame, "too expensive" is not really defining, and if a stack can be transferred to another stack, having two with one in a strongbox seems logical. You possibly lose memories then, but live on. It seems to come down mostly to money and socioeconomic disparity. At one point someone says, fixing a broken leg is too expensive. That's ridiculous

I don't think it was hard to make backups, but that it was expensive, cost prohibitive by the 'have nots' who are unable to afford or acquire the ability to say, clone themselves on demand.

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