Re: How to make money fast (in science fiction)

On Wed, 26 Mar 2008, darkmoon@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 wrote:
>The villain/antagonist in my story (more precisely, a role playing
>scenario) is a super intelligent being, [...]

>The simplest and "scifiest" way - to become an inventor, creating
>wonderful stuff like fusion power, room temterature superconductors,
>artificial intelligence etc.. is plain out.
>[...] enemies [...] serious disturbance from "normal evolution" of 
>comparable civilzations will be noticed.

So, he needs to make money -- not necessarily *fast*; he has time to
spare (at least until his immortality becomes obvious) -- but in a way
that (a) uses his intelligence, (b) doesn't require much up-front
investment, (c) doesn't produce a "signal" to his enemies.

I suggest software.  With superhuman intelligence, he should be able
to write provably correct, bug-free software -- he'd be a sort of
super-Knuth.  He could apply his talents to some unsolved problems,
like reliable image and voice recognition, natural language
processing, translation, spam and virus detection, and robust
operating systems.

Maybe in stages -- "build a better translation widget, and surfers
will beat a path to your website" would attract interest before people
are willing to download a new OS or better networking protocol.

He could do this on his own, but it might be difficult to run a
growing business that way -- he may be inhumanly efficient, he might
be able to type and talk at the same time, but he can still be in only
one place at a time.

It might be advantageous to join a large established company.  He'd
have trouble being directly hired (no college credentials), but he
could arrange to be bought out.  Microsoft, e.g., is pretty good at
making (m/b)illionaires of its top programmers.  

He'd probably want to avoid encryption software or suchlike -- the
government doesn't pay nearly as well.  As noted elsethread, he might
have no moral scruples about selling to monkey-criminals; but this
would be self-defeating if he accelerates the collapse of the society
he's parasitizing.

>The Visitor does not want to destroy the earth, to exterminate or
>enslave the mankind. He just wants to escape as fast as possible. 

It would certainly be inconvenient if the surrounding technological
civilization, the one he's using to bootstrap his escape-gear,
suddenly collapses under the weight of spam and identity theft. That's
an argument for helping improve the critical infrastructure.

(His superhuman intelligence may permit him to find solutions to
persistent social problems, and convince people to implement them, but
that doesn't sound very lucrative.)

>For him, living on Earth is like being stranded among monkeys and he

OTOH, he might have poor human-relations skills (necessary for the
lucrative management track), and he'd need to avoid writing code
that's *too* revolutionary -- none of the junior programmers could
understand it.

("It's difficult to work in groups when you're omnipotent." --Q,
ST:TNG.)

>[...] he cannot hide before modern
>forensic science - if an expert takes sample of his blood or tissue
>and examine his DNA, 

This might be a problem with his pre-hire drug screening.  "Why are
his red blood cells this odd shape?"

>Unfortunately, to just begin, he needs to amass real fortune (in the
>range of billions of dollars).

Once he's become a Microsoft (Yahoo, Google, Oracle, etc.)
millionaire, he can start leveraging his wealth by playing the market.
Maybe.  His superhuman intelligence may allow him to better spot
trends, or to write software that does, i.e., he out-quants Wall
Street's top quants; but this may be an insoluble problem, if the
market is naturally chaotic, or the necessary econometric data is
unavailable.
** Phillip Thorne ** pethorne@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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*  RPI CompSci 1998                                    *
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