robkelk Wrote:Third: The Catgirling Machines were at least inspired by The Professor's Julien Friez machine, and the plans for that are in the public domain in Fenspace. The Professor publishes everything he creates or learns, after all.Does this mean that the Professor published the process he put Julian Friez through to record his personality, all his skills and personal history?
The reason I ask this is because Julian Friez is still alive afterwards. So the Professor devised a way to either do a non-destructive read of his memory, or a destructive read but he put him back together again afterwards (maybe in the process seamlessly inserting the tracking tag into his leg bone).
If this is the case then you only have to look at the problem a bit sideways to realise this means that a solution (if not the solution) to the big problem of uploading minds has already been published in the public domain...
The Professor, in the form of the Julian Friez Machine, has also solved the problem of how to take a recording of a mind and put this into a new body.
Not (yet) solved then is how to:
- take that recording to pieces
- rearrange or omit some of the pieces
- add pieces from other sources
- make-up new pieces out of whole cloth, say by some sort of CAD mind designer system
- assemble pieces together to make a viable new mind
- read and display memories from a recording
- put a recording into something like a robot brain
- load a recording into a computer so it can be run something like an AI
- merge together the experience from multiple originally identical minds to create a mind that has use of all of those experiences
The transhumanists, if no one else, will be sending the Professor proposals of marriage and offering to bear children for him after that...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transhumanism
that is, of course, independent of their original gender. [grin]
I think we need to think very carefully about the usability of the Professor's published plans, because they have very major implications for what happens in Fenspace. I'm assuming that Boskone couldn't make full use of them because, otherwise, why would they have bothered kidnapping the Professor? (Yes, I can see the argument that they wanted whatever else they could get him to make, and with no one else having access to it.)
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"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" - Hawkwind