Editing Mesh (section)

=== Sidebar: Legacy of the Titans ===
Given the technical capabilities of modern personal computers, supercomputers and cutting-edge wired broadband are not needed. But there is another reason they are avoided: the TITANs. Mainframes, hive-mind clusters, and massively parallel distributed computing parallel hive-mind systems are all considered potential dangers in Eclipse Phase, as they possess sufficient processing power and data capacity to enable a seed AI and another potential hard takeoff singularity. Some habitats go so far as to outlaw such systems completely under the severest of penalties: ﬁnal death including the deletion of all backups and recent forks, in most cases.
Those supercomputers that habitats do allow are “hard networks” that control a habitat’s most crucial systems like orbit maintenance thrusters, life support, communications, power, or cutting-edge hypercorp R&D projects. These systems are typically physically wired, heavily monitored, and locked down in electronic data processing centers with strong access restrictions and ruthless real-world security measures. Similarly, AIs themselves are quite often heavily restricted, and it is not unusual for AGIs to be outright banned, especially in the inner system and Jovian Republic. Most intelligent programs are limited with programmed growth restraints, speciﬁcally designed to prevent them from becoming self-upgrading.