RE: clones/'perfect'-mates/self-image

Billy Brown (bbrown@conemsco.com)
Mon, 28 Dec 1998 13:03:46 -0600

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