From: Phil (flick@populus.net)
Date: Mon Sep 27 1999 - 16:52:12 MDT
> In my roleplaying scenario there is a situation just like this: a new
> colony planet, colonized by colonists using advanced automation and
> AI. There are currently 300 people on the entire planet (and many,
> many more AIs), with a grandiose capital and several outlying
> settlements, holiday resorts, monuments and an internet with a huge
> bandwidth. The AIs simply build more stuff to amuse themselves ("Let's
> make a Mount Rushmore out of that mountain range! We can put images
> of all the colonists on the rockfaces... hmm, maybe we could carve in
> our own source code while we are at it!" "The Mary Infiltration
> Project could of course work out of New Stockholm, but why not build
> it a base of its own? I'm itching to try out the Stalinist style on
> the Northern tundras."). It's rather fun to describe this
> "Mega-Brasilia" - empty highways, grandiose gardens, a 400 floor
> skyscraper built like an exponential function with just a single
> office in use.
Why are there only "300 people"? What is a person in this scenario,
anyway? Why are there "colonists"? There could just be a probe that
landed, and constructed people as they were needed for the civilization
it was building.
I'm not saying this would be a good thing. I'm asking whether there is
a place for "people" as we know them in this scenario. Wouldn't people
be just another resource to allocate and deallocate, like heap space,
as they were needed or desired (by what, I'm not sure)?
Phil
flick@populus.net
reply to all -- I'm not on the extropians list anymore as of today.
Maybe later when I get my email filters working.
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