Greetings

[Rynn]

The potential for exploring what it's actually like to live in a post-scarcity world was a big draw for me too I often imagine how different my life would be if money wasn't such a huge concern (I also live paycheck to paycheck with little left over). And if I was in an OA civ learning is definitely something I'd devote a huge amount of time to. The potential for tachydidaxy is huge; with a memory and concentration boost alone I can't imagine how much faster I could learn. Add in fully adaptive lessons, pattern recognition enhancements, augments for parallel processing and memory editing...well I played around with that idea in this thread. Long story short is that something akin to multiple IRL first class degrees could be effortlessly obtained by an OA sophont in just a few months.

Downloading knowledge is something I've often thought of taking a look at, in terms of how we treat it in OA. I'm of the opinion that sophonts (at least those neurotypically similar to humans) would tend to prefer enhanced learning over direct memory edits. The reason being that personality for us is a very fragile thing and if there's one thing that has a good change of changing personality it's education. Change over time is perfectly natural, so fast education with the risk of fast personality change could be largely acceptable. But the type of thing where you go to sleep and wake up with decades-worth of new memories? Even assuming the program that did it compensated for any major psychological disorders that could take place you're very likely to wake up a significantly different person.

Of course that's the other great thing about OA you touched on diversity! In some societies and for some people waking up a new person is perfectly normal and acceptable. In others it's undesirable and a more cautious approach prefered.