Discussion
#PennedPossibilities 1010: What are any of your characters hiding? Why are they hiding it?
(Starter Pack): Jum and Tabitha are both hiding the same thing: they're imposters.
They're supposed to be the memory scans of long dead aristocrats, imprinted on their 6 year old descendants. But they're actually a pair of thieves who tried to rob a booby-trapped tomb and made a hail Mary escape into the uploading pods. Jum erased their metadata: now if they're exposed as fakes they'll be wiped.
@cstross memory wipes are a bit hard on the 6 year old substrates perhaps, therfore the culture doesn't care about that. I look forward to these books.
@cstross
> memory scans of long dead aristocrats, imprinted on their 6 year old descendants
Note this recent post, which startled me at the time:
> Software that we make in the lab:
>
> * Catena https://github.com/Mohinta2892/catena/tree/dev
>
> * CATMAID https://catmaid.readthedocs.io/en/stable/index.html
>
> * Connectome Interpreter https://github.com/YijieYin/connectome_interpreter
>
> ... and others. All geared towards mapping and analyzing brain connectomes with synaptic resolution.
> https://mathstodon.xyz/@albertcardona/116461868505008465
@dougmerritt @albertcardona Yes, I already saw that. (I also saw a long-ago predecessor in roughly 1998 about mapping the stomatogastric ganglion of the Pacific spiny lobster, which spawned a novel: "Accelerando".)
@cstross
That was great in Accelerando; in that case I didn't see the research it was based on.
@dougmerritt @albertcardona I'd earlier read speculative writing about the process by Hans Moravec in the late 1980s. It's been an idea bubbling under for multiple decades at this point.
@cstross
Sure, sure. "The Literature of Ideas" and all that.
It's when reality starts to catch up that I get startled.
(I haven't heard Moravec's name in a while; blast from the past)
There was recently a conference on possible paths towards mapping a whole human brain at synaptic resolution. The technology is no longer science fiction but a problem of economics, engineering and industry.
@albertcardona
...which will presumably change the world in fundamental ways.
@dougmerritt @albertcardona ... Especially for the poor bastard(s) whose brains are destructively sliced'n'diced in order to build the map.
(Hint: they won't be uploaded, they'll be very dead indeed. The first several thousand of them, most likely, even *if* the most optimistic outcomes for mind uploading *are* possible—and they very likely aren't.)
Install bonfire.cafe
Get the full app experience
