From: Joe Jenkins (joe_jenkins@yahoo.com)
Date: Wed Jul 15 1998 - 14:06:14 MDT
Harvey Newstrom vs. United Utilitarians PPL
Joe Jenkins: Bills, Bills, Bills, why else would the System
Administrator of my Universe Simulation Provider be sending me email?
Sys Admin: Greetings valued customer. I am happy to offer you an
opportunity for a 20% discount on our regular rates for one year
realtime/1000 years subjective. This is due to the pending frivolous
lawsuit Harvey Newstrom vs United Utilitarians PPL. Our original
contract that allows us to discontinue dual redundancy after no
recorded errors for 1 year realtime is being called into question by
said litigation. We are temporarily required to halt all such
discontinuance's pending the outcome. We have found a loophole that
works around this problem. To receive the discount you have the
following 2 options:
1. Switch from your current United Utilitarians PPL to Consolodated
Egoist PPL.
2. Participate in a realtime dialog with me for what has been
estimated to be 10 minutes realtime. 15 days of subjective time will
credited to your account. For legal and technical reasons, no
multiplexing is allowed. Your process will be slowed to realtime for
10 minutes. The outcome of our dialog will determine if you are
eligible for the discount. So far, all participants have succeeded in
receiving the discount. Warning, if you are a paranoid Schitzo like
Harvey Newstrom, don't bother.
Joe Jenkins: WOW 20% off for 1000 years, I could party like its 2999.
If I remember right, Consumer Reporter Daniel Fabulich's estimates on
the projected long term cost of switching to Consolidated Egoist PPL
from United Utilitarians PPL was a lot more than my savings would be -
so forget that option. I guess I'll have to arrange for a 15-day
vacation.
Sys Admin: Welcome to realtime Mr. Jenkins. As a 1000x upload I
realize this 10 minutes realtime comes at a great expense to you so
I'll get right to the point. After over a year of runtime, our
diagnostics show that your dual redundant strings have not even
produced a single bit error. Our original contract that allows us to
discontinue/terminate the redundancy after satisfying this requirement
has been rejected by our insurance company pending the outcome of
Harvey Newstrom vs United Utilitarians PPL. Although, in your
original contract you stipulated avoiding upload copy divergence at
all cost, we would require your redundant string to diverge for 5
minutes to allow separate dialogs from your two strings. We presume
that the rational choice of one of your strings would be to
voluntarily terminate. That way we would put to rest our insurance
companies concern of a possible wrongful death case as in the current
litigation. Do you have any questions at this time?
Joe Jenkins: Why cant I just give you permission to terminate one of
my dual redundant strings.
Sys Admin: You've already done that in your contract. Reiterating
that will not satisfy the insurance company.
Joe Jenkins: This is preposterous. My dual redundant string has the
same sensor/effector data on both sides of the string. Everything I
see, hear, or feel is identical on both sides. Even the pseudo-random
generators are running in sync and producing the same results.
Everything I experience and do are identical on both strings. They
are only both there in case of an error. You said yourself the two
strings have not disagreed on a single bit for my entire runtime. I
really don't like the idea of allowing a divergence.
Of course, there was that hang-gliding accident before my
upload. Luckily, that was after we had the technology for
non-destructive full brain scan for backup purposes. But it had been
a full month since my last backup. 24 hours after my accident I found
myself as an upload. The procedure was fully funded by my life
insurance company. That was great because I had wanted to upload for
months but couldn't afford it. On the downside, a full month of my
life before the accident was completely lost. Well at least my memory
of it, the rest of the world seemed to still be firmly attached to
that month. I met a couple of people who claimed to be good friends
of mine, but I never even remembered meeting them. One of them turned
out to be a scam artist who I really had never met. He read about my
accident in the news and decided to try to profit from it. After
filling me in on our friendship, he hit me up for a $500 loan. Since
then I've learned to trust but verify claims about this one month
period in my life. I received a few sympathy cards from friends and
family about the loss I had experienced. This was a little bit
overkill from my perspective though. I felt alive and well minus a
few inconveniences about the lost month.
Now your saying that I should let two copies of myself diverge
by letting them be executed on a different processor with different
sensor/effector data. That will result in Joe Jenkins String 1 and
Joe Jenkins String 2 sitting across the room from each other. After a
couple of minutes of divergence, you'll ask Joe Jenkins String 2 to
voluntarily terminate execution. This sounds acceptable to me. Let's
start the procedure.
Sys Admin: Okay, I'll be halting your process long enough to load
each redundant string to its own processor. Do I have your permission
for an estimated 5 ms realtime stasis.
Joe Jenkins: No poblemo.
Sys Admin: Welcome Joe Jenkins String 1 and Joe Jenkins String 2.
You are now running separately. Joe Jenkins String 2, you have been
provided with a red button on the arm of your chair. Lifting the
spring loaded bumper shield and pressing this button will permanently
terminate your process and erase all of your data. For legal reasons,
you must press this button yourself with no help from Joe Jenkins
String 1 or me. You may proceed.
Joe Jenkins String 2: In order to verify the proper functioning of
string 1, I would like to have a private conversation with him. I
appreciate Mr. Sys Admin leaving the room so that string 1 could
enumerate a few passwords and answer a few questions only he would know.
Joe Jenkins String 1: Well number 2 since your are nearly identical
to me, I think I know what you are going to say, but I can only
imagine what its like to be in your situation. Now that your
sensor/effector data is different from mine, I bet that effected the
seeds of your pseudo-random number generators enough that they are
giving different results. So I'm sure you'll give me some surprises
here and there.
Joe Jenkins String 2: Hello number 1, let me tell you how it feels
from my perspective - They made a backup of me 5 minutes ago and now
they would like to terminate my execution and reinstate the backup.
Well this is almost exactly the same as the hang-gliding accident.
The only difference is that the backup is being run right now instead
of being in stasis and instead of losing 1 month, I'll be losing less
than five minutes. Losing the one month wasn't all that bad but I
would certainly never do it voluntarily - maybe for a price. Now I'm
faced with the fact that there will be two divergent processes of me
if I refuse to push the button. This is a high price to pay. Where
as, If I do push the button I loose 5 minutes of nothing special but I
gain my 20% discount. That settles it. Asta la Vista baby.
Joe Jenkins
Joe_jenkins@yahoo.com
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