From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Sun Oct 24 1999 - 12:01:06 MDT
At 11:24 PM 23/10/99 -0700, Robert Bradbury wrote:
>I believe that Skye may have hit upon something every
>interesting that partially solves a major problem
>involving self-modifying AI that has plagued the
>list and worried me greatly:
>
>> It might be interesting if you could create an
>> artificial environment where you could test such
>> things. For example, if you had an artificial human
>> body existing on some kind of programmed level
Of course this idea is a commonplace of sf, and has been at least since
Fred Pohl's `The Tunnel Under the World' in 1955, and Dan Galouye's 1964
novel SIMULACRON-3 (aka COUNTEFEIT WORLD) - where, interestingly, observers
from the next layer up can `merge' with selected sims via upload-style
couplers, allowing a lower level guy to `escape' into and overwhelm the
brain of the cognitive scientist who wrote him, using an isomorphism of his
own brain as a template. (Warning: never try to do this at home, kids.)
Damien Broderick
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