ZELLICH@SRI-NIC.ARPA (10/04/85)
From: Rich Zellich <ZELLICH@SRI-NIC.ARPA> I was wondering when someone would bring this up again;we did a couple of weeks worth of discussion on this a year or two ago. Carl Greenburg seems to have hit the main points already in the first [new] message on this subject. I don't think we ever hit some of the social/legal issues before, though. If you "print out" another copy of yourself, which one of you gets your job, has to pay taxes,etc.(assuming the copies are sufficiently identical that no differenece can be told between the original and any of the copies)? -Rich -------
carl@proper.UUCP (Carl Greenberg) (10/09/85)
Imagine the ramifications of some business taking a basic human they found best
for a certain job, making modifications to the person, and then just copying the
person off. Re-create them from stored images daily, and they won't strike,
if you just re-start them each morning and terminate them in the evening. Or
perhaps if you copied yourself off, you could do twice the amount of work in
a given day. Do you get paid overtime?
And how about assassination? Not only could you restore the backup of
the President or whoever, you could kill the President and take his backup
hostage! ("We have the tape with a recording of Ronald Reagan on it. We are
going to destroy vital bytes telling which parts of his body go where every
day. The more you wait before ransoming, the more screwed up he'll look when
you reboot him.")
If you can do that, look at travel. If I want to go over and visit
a friend of mine on the USENET, I leave a backup copy at home in case UUCP
fails and my friend will just download the copy that travels. ZAP! I can
take a short vacation in the time it takes for this message to travel to him.
Larry Niven did a series on a society with teleport booths, I can't remember
which stories are in which books. A sure sign I need to re-read them.
Could you imagine what would happen if a bit of line noise got you?
Could be nasty. That's the only reason I don't want to go through- until they
have it 100% perfect, I don't want to have my body and the various chemicals
and electrical impulses stored in this lump of grey matter between my ears
mangled, not my hypothetical soul!
Carl Greenberg