Biopunk 2037 - World Building
Some notes on trying to set the scene for the story
I recently wrote a short story on a fictional scenario. I probably spent more time thinking about the world building instead of the story, so here is some of the notes I had on the world. Kinda scattered and rushed.
Setting
Roughly 2037, US
Post-AI-moratorium, biotech-heavy, transhumanist-normalized
Growing tech
Cities have facilities where you can grow bodies / organ sacs
~2025: first invented, didn’t really work
2026: working prototypes. Animal models start to take production for meat, they are surprisingly inexpensive, some research labs start to replace their animals with organ sac versions, they can grow faster due to some genetic modifications
2027: started growing human organs sac in tanks at scale, Originally took ~10 years to grow a full body. Inflation is high so animal products start getting subsidized as they may potentially help with food costs
2028: animal production grows extremely quickly, due to some happenstance that these can mostly repurpose most factory animals with ease but for less cost (inflation concerns)
By 2029 human production speed was also down to like 4-5 years, mass production starts to happen, there is enough evidence that it’s mostly the brain that requires the long puberty
By 2031 it was down to 3-4 years and production beyond rich people becomes more common too.
By 2037: ~25 months period due to diminishing returns from GPT 6 scaffolding.
Diminishing returns since the AI moratorium and the FDA getting more risk-averse again, people have mostly been mining the same base models since 2026 with various finetunes, but it only gets you so far.
Automation arc
High AI automation across the board, but there was a moratorium in 2026 after GPT 6 Extreme and/or Claude Mythos 5 etc.
Datacenters can no longer do “base model” training runs, but fine-tuning opensource models on small setups is fine (up to ~100x GB200s equivalent legally) and datacenters are monitored for large runs using AI agents.
The original base models eventually did get leaked, everyone has access to them.
There are a lot of highly specialized fine-tunes, these automate a lot of the economy
Robotics is unsolved due to [hand wave that it needs a really large base model and that’s not possible anymore, something something scaling laws, not sure I buy it]. maybe also some “Save Humans and Ban Robots Act of 2029” or something
China runs basically the same models — no real model-quality gap anywhere
Heat dissipation means with satellite surveillance it is impossible to hide gigawatt-scale data centers
Data centers forced to split up / stay small
The Stop AI Unemployment Act prevents layoffs — protects everyone’s income
The Save Small Businesses Act keeps zombie companies alive even when they’ve effectively gone bust
These get cheap, non-repayable loans from banks, which eventually got saved by being saved by the US government.
Net result: lots of people have nominal jobs at companies that are basically shells, doing AI-supervised work for income that flows largely from government backstops
There are also people getting stimulus cheques from the government if they are broke, but these are looked down upon, told to get manual labor jobs or to "create AI applications” which continue to exist.
AI companies that produce the underlying models can’t differentiate or train new models, so it’s a race-to-the-bottom on profit. Also under USG grip.
Mostly the US is rich enough that it doesn’t matter.
US government continues to spend ~3% of GDP on foreign aid, so situation in many foreign countries continues to be kinda screwed. If they have datacenter capacity, that tends to be the main source, otherwise, they rely on kindness from others…
Bodies & Organs
Stimulation
Still not fully understood how consciousness develops for brain-spine-only setups
Bodies need stimulation while growing or they don’t develop properly
For “ethical reasons” they are often given various drugs, though cannot do this all the time.
Some weird dance-stimulation rig is used to stimulate nerve endings, and also because neuroscientists thought that it makes the CNS look more like a happy one.
Red coloring
Organ sacs are colored so as to make them visually distinct from humans. Kinda ugly bright red color, also somewhat bruised looking too.
You occasionally see people colored like this just because of memetics/counter culture.
Re/depigmentation is not that hard, but also non-trivial. requires medical equipment.
Originally it was deemed patented to try do this, but it was decriminalized — and people know there are more risks if you’re red and dead
Reserve bodies
Standard practice that everyone has a reserve body
This was partially due to lack of regulations in the area, some like weird loophole where it doesn’t count as cloning and is just an extension of your body, banning robotics made it so that government needed to make concession
Initial concerns about equitable access, but rolled out fast
Bodies are cheap to maintain — fed slop, not moving, not thinking
Spillover effect: lab-grown meat from the same tech became way more ethically acceptable. Some people prefer to torture the original animals or whatever, but that just seems worse. Most people then just disagree.
Body design generations / fads
Body designs come in generations, with newer gens coming out often
Older / retro experimental designs still around. Anthropomorphic lemur is one of these.
Current fad: “slime girl” bodies, with translucent green skin. Mostly from new tech in modifying skin texture being made legal by FDA
People sometimes upgrade between bodies, which means going through the integration process
There is a lack of any particularly cool things like wings, because it’s hard and much more profitable to just keep producing marginal improvements.
Brain/head swap (integration)
Possible but really sucks
Takes about 9 weeks to reconnect nerve endings, even using best peptides, growth medium, and specialised bacteria
Bacteria + enzymes + stem cells (or something or other) reattach brain to body.
The reattachment process needs you to be conscious some of the time
Some of that time can be spent dissociated or sleeping. Most of that conscious time is spent living in your own brain with no external stimulus, for days at a time
Toward the end you start getting some senses back
Incredibly lonely. Some people go insane. People who’ve done it try not to remember it too much.
GeneCard
Standard tool for compatibility analysis
Physical metallic card. Tap two together to check matches.
Used for organ matching
Organ legal status
Organs of an unconscious person count as extensions of their body, not personal possessions
This means: you can’t consent to give them away while unconscious, even via your AI assistant
AI assistants don’t have jurisdiction over this kind of thing (per the Save Humans and Ban Robots Act of 2029)
External organ support
Most infra is built assuming you can just replace people’s organs pretty easily, basically everyone has ones in reserve. There exist mechanical substitutes but these mostly exist to keep static organ sac bodies alive, not normal humans who live their every day life.
Wearable artificial liver: continuous, suitcase-sized “liver box,” must dock to a wall unit ~1–2 hrs/day
Lungs are the “expensive must-have” reserve organ — no good external substitute exists, so insurance premiums spike hard if you don’t have a lung reserve
Liver is the manageable one externally; insurance reflects the asymmetry
Other body stuff
Productivity / mood drugs: makes people more happy / productive / less risk-taking. Some get side effects, some don’t like that it’s not natural.
Government provides dissociatives. “Safest thing you can be doing.” Officially: people rate their quality of life at work significantly better in studies. Unofficially: it’s just kinda wasting your time away, and it’s unclear how it got past medical review boards. People used dissociatives to get through long stretches of waiting (e.g. between integration check-ins, between organ growths).
“Giga productivity max” people: slightly ugly purple skin to improve bloodflow, multiple neural probes into the body
Current neural augmentation techniques kinda lacking
Some old habits like physical input remain because more standard, and relearning new input is slightly annoying (e.g. QWERTY)
De-aging still under research, some results, not FDA-approved
HappyHelm
Helmet that helps protect head from injury
Not mandatory but there’s a tax/insurance incentive for people who wear it
This has kind of meant smartphones are no longer needed
Has similar annoyances to whatever those that exist in smartphones now do.
Economy
Income
Some amount of credits provided to everyone (job or stimulus cheques)
Plus the legacy-job arrangements above
Most people are some combination of UBI + nominal-job income
By 2037 it’s like people are just running out of ideas, mostly the easy fruit from mining old LLMs has been extracted. People putting ever larger amounts of resources into mining further capabilities out of the existing models / mining their history.
Smart contracts
Smart-contract favors are a normal way for people to exchange personal deals (organs, body parts, services)
LLMs are used to draft, review, and negotiate them, and people send their prompts to eachother.
Robotics
Some exists, but limited
The Save Humans and Ban Robots Act of 2029 bans robot bodies and limits AI-assistant authority over physical/bodily decisions
Additional in-world handwave: robotics needs a really large base model (per scaling laws), which is also banned by the AI moratorium
Geopolitics
I’m not too sure. China and EU etc have the same models mostly. Scaffolding advantages have hit a relative plateau within a few years.
Otherwise i didn’t really think about geopolitics
Daily Life
Housing
Current housing mandates go to the extreme, people want extremely expensive high quality housing as a minimum standard, with sharing made illegal and and prices being high.
2 bedrooms per person unless they’re in a romantic relationship, etc.
The mandate technically doesn’t require checking if anybody is in a relationship other than filling in a form (conditioned on both being citizens)
Legacy homes (predating standards) exist. small, regulated minimum rent, cheap, dusty
Common loophole: split a legacy home with a “partner” you barely know
Insurance
Mandatory (someone died uninsured → law)
Premiums spike hard after claims (e.g. 470 → 34,150 credits/month after a serious accident)
Premiums depend on: time since last claim, what reserves you have for hard-to-replace organs (esp. lungs)
Voluntary mobility restrictions reduce premiums significantly
If you can’t afford the regular tier, you get auto-opted into restrictions
VR / Apps
Some people are fully VR-pilled, just live in slop apps
Apps run on a heavily optimised GPT-6, which has been running of juice since 2026 probably like 5 years ago at least, so things are mostly in phases of recreating old things, since creating new things is much harder
Most genuinely good content that is viable already explored
Have to wait years for new content; people spend the gap “out in the wild”
Protagonist
unproven_lemur
Username + nickname; legal name kinda just forgotten
Picked “lemur” because it was popular at the time, just stuck with it
An anthropomorphic lemur (one of the older / more retro experimental body designs) Sometimes wishes they held out for newer gen versions, sometimes thinks the retro design is cool in its own way
Furry, non-binary, transhumanist defaults
Had a phase making math videos for a while (hence “unproven”)
Bored with life
Goes doing risky things, normal ski slopes too boring, goes off-piste, recurring accident pattern
EA-coded, donates roughly half their salary to non-US causes (GiveDirectly-style) due to the fact that so little goes abroad by default.
Would transfer up to ~2/3 of income to keep mobility, since organ-finding without reserves is expensive (the disincentive is intentional)
Job
Works on an email app for medical startups
Company technically went bust, but he can’t be fired (Stop AI Unemployment Act) and the shell company gets kept alive (Save Small Businesses Act)
Actual labor done by AI sub-agents
Wears a ring with an LED that changes colour when agents get stuck
When it lights up he has to whip out a laptop within a few minutes and give therapy-style prompts: “keep going,” “I believe in you,” “well, that sounds really tough. Have you considered thinking deeply about a few main options and weighing them up?”
Basically a super-therapy interface for AI agents
Genuinely not a useful job, but he’s still managing financially. lucky to have a relatively well paying job before the Stop AI Unemployment Act kicked in.
Some of these ideas are really badly thought out. I basically hand-wave away all of the geopolitics and robotics and 10 years of progress, but I think it’s fine for a short story / to get some of the key ideas on organ sacs across
God fucking damn it I want to live here so bad, why does the real world have to be such a horrendously torturous shit hole of pain and misery WHY