IEEE Special Report On the Singularity

jbcarr83 writes "The IEEE Spectrum is running a special issue on the technological singularity as envisioned by Vernor Vinge and others. Articles on both sides of the will it/won't it divide appear, though most take the it will approach. I found Richard A.L. Jones' contribution, 'Rupturing The Nanotech Rapture,' to be of particular interest. He puts forward some very sound objections to nanomachines of the Drexler variety."

Comments

hmmm.

[apodyopsis]

Lets imagine you can upload your mind into a machine.

It will not be you. It will be a copy. You will still be the one that dies afterwards.

It would be you if a progressive upgrade path could be found from biochemical to mechanical/electrical system.

The copy however will believe that he is is you as he will have no memory of his existence after the "transfer" unlike poor flesh you in the xerox machine.

Who has legal rights until/after fleshy death?

Even then the copy will be subject to mechanical breakdowns, loss of sensation, and other issues interacting with the real world.

Would they want to interact with normal world? Would they prefer a virtual world?

As a society I feel that we are nowhere near ready for such questions, and in any case I strongly suspect individual sanity would not survive transfer.

For a good fictional account of this (there are many) I still hold the Gateway books by Frederick Pohl - and the death of Robinette Broadhead and the society of electronic people stored after death.

In the book, to interact with us really slow and boring humans he creates an electronic avatar and animates it whilst having a fun time in virtual fantasy world, checking on it every while to see if anything interesting has been said and instructing it on what to say next.

Re:hmmm.

[Bazman]

So tell me, when you go to sleep at night, or perhaps go under general anaesthetic in hospital, what wakes up? Is it you, or is it a copy of you? And importantly, how could you tell?

Re:The singularity already happened

[UID30]

I read a paper a few years back (somewhere webby, but i can't remember where) that came to the conclusion ... "If it is at all possible to build a virtual system with enough detail to describe our universe, then it is probable we are in one already."

As I remember, the conversation threads then devolved into whether or not it would be possible for one of those virtual systems to, within the simulation, build a virtual simulation with the same resolution ... giving rise to 1st, 2nd, 3rd,... and n-th tier simulations. ... which inevitably gave rise to the old post, "You're very clever, young man, very clever, but it's turtles all the way down!"