The Voices in My Head

Once I was human. I took part in a little experiment. My personality was downloaded entirely into software, and interfaced with Second Life. Once, I was flesh and blood. Now, silicon has replaced carbon, and my dreams are digital.

Why, if the Soul can fling the Dust aside,
And naked on the Air of Heaven ride,
Were’t not a Shame — were’t not a Shame for him
In this clay carcase crippled to abide?

–Omar Khayyam

Of course, this isn’t true. yet.

But what if it could be? What would we gain from this? And what would we lose from it?

The most obvious gain is effective immortality, at least until the server crashes. But then you can be brought back from the last backup. This brings a new level of importance to making good backups. Many RL businesses collapse completely when faced with complete database loss. But that’s just money. Backups gain a whole new level of importance when it is literally your life that is at stake. A second gain is that you don’t have any particular need to eat, sleep, or rest, unless you count time taken out to backup data. This can easily triple most people’s productivity.

But what would you lose?

You become dependant on a whole industrial infrastructure in a way you could only imagine before. Anyone could literally walk up to you and unplug you, and there would be nothing you can do about it. if electricity fails, you are dead. If the hardware fails, you are completely dependant on others for repair.

And for me, not having a real body would be a real loss. Never to touch another person, never to taste good food or drink, that would be a real loss, and one which would quite possibly drive me (more) insane.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 14th, 2007 at 9:43 am and is filed under Philosophy, Warda. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.