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Candidates for destructive uploading

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Fri, 2010-06-04 22:42

King Shere King Shere's picture

Candidates for destructive uploading

Read recently that Terry Pratchet has Alzheimer & expressed the desire to commit suicide before the endgame looms. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/5960166/Sir-Terry-Pratchett... Some Alzheimer patients donate their brains to science. "Rational" Suicidal Rich (or publicly Loved) people with terminal illnesses, would likely be the first test-subjects/ candidates for destructive uploading & its research. Instead of assisted suicide treatment, they get offered the destructive uploading treatment. Its still a form of controlled death under painless circumstances. Easing the patients endgame pains. Their remains scanned for posterity, with the potential to be uploaded. When it works, their uploaded persona's can continue their good work. Less chance for the fans missing out on (unwritten) masterpieces. Worst case scenario is that it works, but they get a miserable existence & still keep the damages of their earlier terminal ailment. Or get stuck as a avatar in a second life environment for near eternity.

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[img]http://boxall.no-ip.org/img/tc_userbar.jpg[/img] [img]http://boxall.no-ip.org/img/exh_userbar.jpg[/img] [img]http://boxall.no-ip.org/img/argo_userbar.jpg[/img] [i]"To find fault is easy; to do better may be difficult."[/i] Plutarch

Fri, 2010-06-18 14:43

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

Re: Candidates for destructive uploading

As a would-be uploading researcher (and cryonics customer) I am all in favour. Except that we are years away from getting suicide plus freezing or scanning legally doable. It is not just the assisted suicide bit that is messy, it is also going to be tricky to demonstrate that the organisation receiving the "anatomical donation" was not pressuring them or promising things. But I think in the long run this is going to become legal. This of course suggests some interesting EP characters. Not just restored celebrities (some of which date from the current era: Paris Hilton can be expected to live to the 2060s, not too far from brainscans and nanotpreservation), but AIs based on early imperfect scans. Maybe the 43-epsilon module used by all AGIs was based on a particular brainscan made of Jeffrey Sanchez - in life a complete nobody, but thanks to his anatomical donation to the Connectome Project a small part of him lives on across the solar system. And some early AGIs used much more of his neural network, to the extent that a few of his quirks and personality traits seemed to show up.

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