Dartz Wrote:I'd disagree...Yes, it is rare, but it gets done. I'm suggesting some early bad experiences might have made a lot of people, a lot more cautious.
On the grounds that it's rare enough in 2015 that even the technology to make a partial copy is considered a very big deal , the technology is somewhat limited by lack of proper storage for that sort/amount of data, (among other things) and it's something another faction are specifically working on to achieve in Season 3.
It's a big, world changing can of worms to have it even close to readily available.
As for storage capacity, looked at from some points of view, an AI of human-level intelligence, and potentially experience, must by their very nature have comparable amounts of storage. They've been around from the beginning. They can also back their entire selves up, for safety in some cases. Without that obviously requiring rooms full of storage racks.
How much? I've seen estimates of the storage needed to describe a human mind which vary from a few terabytes, to a few petabyes, a range of a thousand times. We have IRL cheap terabyte drives and cheap USB sticks in the gigabytes - even if you say handwavium improves the capacity by only a factor of a thousand, storing a mind image on a single device looks quite practical. I think the top blu-ray disc storage I've heard of (still in the lab) was 200G - x1000 and a small stack of those could almost certainly hold a mind image.
No, it isn't readily available. It is a hideous dangerous process - get it wrong and you may have murdered someone. Subtle flaws that may take years to appear are something best not thought about.
Given all that, making a copy of a mind is one thing. Having a handwavium device that you don't understand that can make that copy 'run' in computer hardware, or build a working inorganic brain from it, or even a new biological brain, is another thing. Being able to take a recorded image of a mind, extract memories to view, understand logic and motivation, construct a new mind from bits from several sources... Editing existing minds... That is a massive area of new technology.
On a meta level, we don't want people to be able to clone minds too easily, as it wrecks a whole set of story possibilities. Moving minds from one place to another is one thing, messing with them... Having a 'mind amplifier', that lets you run several bodies at once - AIs have been doing that with remotes from quite early on. A handwavium trick that allows biological minds to do something similar, in a limited way, which doesn't actually involve any (usable) copies of minds that people can mess with - that doesn't seem too unreasonable. Even an unstable, truncated, mind, needing regular re-synchronisation can be quite useful.
Season 3, I could see human bodies being grown from DNA samples, and then having compatible minds (that fit their genetic possibilities) installed in them. That might be one way for cyborgs to 'go back' to being purely flesh beings - it unlikely to be an easy, or even pleasant, process, but it looks as though it should be workable. The meta question is, would that fit the stories people want to tell in Fenspace?
Quote:EDIT: I can't recall where or when, but somebody mentioned they wantedRob Kelk:
to put a hold on intentional, reliable mind-uploading technology,
because it might interfere with a story they're working on.
http://drunkardswalkforum...the-Julian-Friez-Machine
requested not too much digging into the JFM.
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"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" - Hawkwind