From: Rob Sweeney (rjs@rsie.com)
Date: Thu Feb 17 2000 - 21:43:56 MST
john grigg (starman125@hotmail.com) wrote on Thu, Feb 17, 2000 at 08:07:03PM -0800:
> Anders wrote:
>> Hmmm... I wonder exactly who we are talking with on the net. OK, a quick
>> [ ...]
> A century from now this will be a real dilemmma! While today a person might
> wonder if the other person on the net they are beginning to care about is
> really telling the truth when they say they are just a bland, somewhat
> upgraded transhuman. Or are they an A.I., posthuman or some kind of
> uplifted animal? That VR image could be a big lie.
Anyone read Pat Cadigan's _Synners_ ? Almost that very scenario was in
that book - a "person" (AI, actually the first AI, having spontaneously
arisen out of the net) who was ubiquitous on email networks finally
"met" one of the characters in a VR simulation - what gave the AI away
was that the VR was just too good - no one (who had any sort of life)
would have had the time, patience, or ability to put such a simulation
together. Decent book, didn't get much attention as I recall and hard
to find. (the fun bit is this was actually assigned reading in a
course I had in grad school...)
/rs
-- Rob Sweeney: Information Ecology. rjs@rsie.com, http://www.rsie.com/ Time is a warning.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:26:53 MST