From: Billy Brown (bbrown@conemsco.com)
Date: Mon Dec 28 1998 - 12:03:46 MST
Hal Finney wrote:
> You could have an "extended family" of duplicates of
> yourself, who have all diverged to various degrees, but who cooperate,
> play together, get together for family reunions, and generally support
> each other..
I suppose self-compatibility would be important if you wanted to make such a
'duplicate family', but I have trouble envisioning a scenario in which many
people would actually do so. Copying personalities (presumably via an
upload/download process) requires that we have very advanced nanotechnology,
which in turn requires huge improvements in our ability to create complex
systems. As a result, it should be possible to do much better than simply
duplicating yourself.
If uploading is possible at all, it should be feasible to re-engineer an
uploaded mind just like any other piece of software. You could run multiple
instances of your sensory-processing and motor-control software in parallel,
allowing you to control more than one body at once. For better fault
tolerance you could even turn yourself into a collective mind, with local
processing in each body so that they can function if your data links go
down. Spread yourself across a few hundred humanoid bodies and a similar
number of useful robots and/or vehicles, and you become very hard to kill.
How's that for an interesting post-human mode of existence!
Billy Brown, MCSE+I
bbrown@conemsco.com
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