Too Late For Rapture

* See also Technologies
* See also Historic_Tech_Timeline
==You Can Push Technology Only So Far And Have It Be Plausible==
The Skill Is In Making It Fit and Not Have It Wander Into Bad Fantasy
Practicalities apply while Handling : Era, Complexity, Cost, Scale ...
Most of Rapture was fairly Conventional for what existed at the time ( inside the massive concrete required to keep out the massive water pressure ).
The Normal Period Details of Rapture are interesting in themselves. Having everything Wave_of_the_hand changed to Flash Gordon would upset the whole Nostalgia aspect which made the game special.
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ICs - SemiConductor Integrated Circuits ( our modern world is built around these )
There were way too many OTHER missing technologies in Rapture's era ( BioShock was Sci-Fi not Fantasy ) to have had these. Rapture is set in a normal World timeline.
I would propose ( to justify game elements like The Thinker ) to have Bio-Electronics be developed in Rapture - leveraging the ADAM genetic modification/manipulation tech.
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How To Build "The Thinker" With Such Primitive Hardware ? :
You CAN'T with only transistors and vacuum tubes.
Programmable Computers were starting at the time of Raptures founding. But AI requires a great deal of computer processing abilities.
I push a 'Bio-Electronics' Technology ( leveraging the Genetic advances ) as a possible way of miniaturization circuitry to get something alot closer to what it would need to be for Real Time AI ( still well short of 'sentience' - which we can't do even today, but might 'Mimick' something like. ) Make use of the natural structure of Brain Neurons/Nerve cells - but actually to reverse-perturb the way IC chips work.
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Deep Sea Oil Drilling - Decades Away
Magic Auto-Pilots - for Bathyspheres
Consumer Product Color TV
Personal Computers
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