From: Louis Newstrom (newsnewstrom@home.com)
Date: Sat Feb 02 2002 - 08:38:30 MST
----- Original Message -----
From: "Wayne Hayes" <wayne@cs.toronto.edu>
> On Wed, 23 Jan 2002 20:17:05, Eugene Leitl wrote:
> >On Wed, 23 Jan 2002, Wayne Hayes wrote:
> >> ...Then you
> >> spend a month (or a year) of subjective time pondering the question
> >> posed to you, and then get back to your client with an answer before
> >> they've had time to finish their coffee.
I see three flaws with this scenario.
1)
The first is the assumption that your uploaded self will be faster. People
always quote the speed of electricity vs. the speed of neurons, but they
fail to take into account the paralell processing that goes on in the human
brain. Just as a far-fetched example, if I uploaded a person into an Excel
spreadsheet, each variable change would take seconds (minutes? hours?) to
recalculate the entire spreadsheet. Such an upload would be horribly SLOW
compared to flesh and blood.
Eventually, they will fix this. They will make processors and
multiprocessor systems faster. They question is will people use them? Once
you are speeded up to normal, would you want to speed up faster? Before
everyone jumps in to say yes, ask yourself why? If you can already
communicate to the uploaded people quite fine, who would be the first to
want to go faster? All that would happen is that everyone else (uploaded
and not) would be boringly slow to you. You, yourself would not feel any
difference. So, who would spend time and effort to do it?
2)
The second flaw is sheer boredom. Even if the technology makes you faster,
how many people have the focus to think about something for a month at a
time? I see no reason to believe that the uploaded month of thinking would
be much more productive than the flesh and blood month of thinking.
3)
The third flaw is economics. Even if you have a fast upload, and a mind
focused enough to think about something for a month at a time, why would
they? Today, companies pay people money. Without money people can't get
food. How many people, if they didn't need food or shelter, would work for
someone else instread of on their own ideas? I don't think uploaded people
would care enough. (They might care about cancer, or something, but those
issues have been thought out enough that just sitting and thinking won't
help those issues.)
> >You do not interact meaningfully with a statue-littered landscape. By
> >means other than bulldozering it, I mean.
Luckily, I don't think uploads would spend the effort to bulldoze the
statues. Even if this situation comes about, the statues wouldn't have any
affect to the uploaded so why would they bother to bulldoze them?
--- Louis Newstrom louisnewstrom@home.com
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