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Character concept: The man who open-sourced himself

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Sun, 2011-02-27 19:18

DataPacRat DataPacRat's picture

Character concept: The man who open-sourced himself

There's more than one way to try to avoid X-Risks...

DataPacRat wrote:
A necessary part of the psychology of someone willing to go through this strategy would be a willingness to accept the risk of self-napping. (Or, perhaps, even going so far as to open-source his own ego, so that /anyone/ who wanted to create a copy of him, for whatever purpose, would be able to.)

Imagine a character who took one of his backups, and released it in the same way that open-source nanofab blueprints are released - so that anyone who had the ability to run an infomorph (or sleeve an ego) would be able to instantiate a copy of him, if they wanted. Just how /interesting/ do you think the ensuing complications would likely be?

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Thank you for your time,

Sun, 2011-02-27 20:57

The Green Slime The Green Slime's picture

Re: Character concept: The man who open-sourced himself

Sure there's nothing to stop a person doing that - the technological and financial means to do so would likely be trivial. But there is another very important requirement that curtails so many of transhumanity's technological potentialities: the finite supply of attention. People who compete too strongly for that are called attention whores. Just why should anyone care to copy this guy? What makes him more interesting than the zetabytes of information competing for the average mesh user's time and attention at any given second of every day? Maybe those emotionally close to him would be motivated to keep his backups close to hand, as well as those he pays to do so, but would anyone else? A present day analogy would be asking people on a p2p network to download and store every single file off your PC so that you don't lose anything when it dies. People might be happy to pick and choose the files that interest them, but the chances of strangers taking the time and bandwidth to download your whole system, largely only for your benefit, are pretty much zip. I can conceive of social networks on the mesh providing a function of instant forking - the more important the profile's function, the higher the grade of fork (e.g. your employment profile could offer access to a fast-downloading delta fork, whereas say, your dating profile would offer an alpha fork available for virtual dates, all vetted by muses and pre-installed with short lifespans depending on rights set by the original ego). This would be as close as decent people get to mass self-replication. But the act of totally surrendering all rights to the one thing you, as a transhuman, truly own for the sake of no questions asked, do-as-your-darkest-sadomasochistic-urges-will Ego-copying would be a pretty sleazy business, I think. Might there not even exist laws against surrendering your ego copyright, considering anyone from a lowly thug to a shrewd hypercorp could reproduce you into their own slave army? Damn this setting is crazy.

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[img]http://boxall.no-ip.org/img/iso_userbar.jpg[/img] [img]http://boxall.no-ip.org/img/aliens_userbar.jpg[/img] [i]Time will perfect matter.[/i]

Mon, 2011-02-28 00:04

Lord High Munchkin Lord High Munchkin's picture

Re: Character concept: The man who open-sourced himself

I'm sure someone must have done it (possibly as some form of "performance art project"), it probably happened shortly after the technology that allowed it became available. However, in 2146 it would likely be considered such antediluvian, crass, low-taste that no one with any self-respect would consider it.

Mon, 2011-02-28 02:49

ssfsx17

Re: Character concept: The man who open-sourced himself

It starts with a few people living this lifestyle with each other, as infomorphs, in some backwater satellite Then some anarchists, ultimates, exhumans, etc. try to improve their own "functionality" by trying to merge with the egos. This is an incredibly stressful process, but those who survive the process claim to be much better than those who run on closed-source egos. Eventually, many guides are written on how to successfully merge with an open-source ego. Then some extropian businesses decide to cut costs by trying to use these open-source egos, sometimes making psychosurgical modifications in order to improve the "functionality" and "stability." The net result is far fewer stresses for merging with those who have the same motivations as the open-source egos, as well as better Willpower over the long run. Then some of the edgier hypercorporations, who have no power on the Planetary Consortium, start using these open-source egos to compete with the others. The source "code" also starts finding its way into the underground worlds of Venus, Luna and Mars. Eventually, the Planetary Consortium faces a situation in which it can either accept open-source egos and thus remain competitive, or die from the fierce competition. Will this be the end of individuality? It may be possible for each person to make their own "distribution" or custom-version of the ego, with the changes being available to everyone else, but not necessarily being adopted by anyone else... could that be called individuality?

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