> In a message dated 96-12-18 23:12:57 EST, you write:
>
> [ stealing timeslices ]
Uploads cannot be run on a sequential/von Neumann machine (unless you
happen to have several spare MYrs, and are interested in actually
watching the Sun go off the main sequence). Competition for
computational resources and bandwidth both should be very real, though.
This should cause streamlined designs to overwhelm the more baroque,
barnacle-encrusted natural ones, on the middle to long run.
> Communicating in real time might be difficult but the uploaded have not would
> still be able to publish its ideas. In this way it could possible work its
> way up.
A world which can fabricate uploads will look drastically different than
our current one. I'd consider the delta to be at least as large as
between a neolithical village, and modern Manhattan. Should future things
even slightly follow predicted dynamics, we will see some wildly
improbable things happening. Few days ago, I've picked up a nice SciFi
novel. It is called "Particle Physics and Astrophysics", and it is
quite outdated, since published in 1989. If you are tracking IT progress,
and remember how leisurly things used to happen back then, in 1983, or
so, the dynamics of end-1996, at least for me, are at times frightening
(also, quite depressing, but that is another story). But we ain't seen
nothing yet! How's that for frightening?
> Uploads would probably desire a physical body of some kind. In this case,
Why should they? Transmuting asteroidal material into circuitry, and
other machinery will be a low-level function, and communicating with
slow, stupid humans (slowing your timebase for them? why, on earth?)
> those with higher processing speeds would be better able to control multiple
> bodies. They would build up wealth and control more bodies. The poor could
Why do you need your body now? Because it is your interface with the only
reality you know. But uploads live in vastly richer version of it, in the
artifical reality. This is not escapism. Quite the vice versa: humans
will have to protect their bit'o garden from greedy machines, ready to
chew up inhabited planets for breakfast. Pulling the plug? Ridiculous.
We won't shut them down, they will us.
> do this but it would take more time. The same is true of our society today.
>
> My personal view is that individual identity will cease to have meaning in a
> world of uploads. Communication between individuals could be so complete
While this is possible, we might wind up with a hierarchy of
metaindividuals, just a more pronounced version of what we have now.
> that one could not tell where one ends and the other begins.
>
> Dan Hook
ciao,
'gene