[ExI] we stand on the shoulders of giants

[Emlyn]

2009/7/4 spike <spike66 at att.net>:
>
> We stand on the shoulders of giants, and most of the time we don't even
> realize it.
>
> spike

There's the argument for rolling back IP laws in a nutshell. Nice.

But on topic, come with me on a walk into magical nanosanta land.
Imagine a future where we have nanobots running around in us doing
continuous monitoring and repair, and I guess where they can reproduce
and contruct external stuff and so forth, general assemblers.

An excellent thing to do in that case is to embed a lot of information
into the nanotech system; probably the sum of human knowledge, plus
tools for bootstrapping from scratch in a scenario such as Spike
describes (or, you know, post-holocaust, or whatever). DNA carries the
instructions to build us from scratch, massively redundantly
throughout the body; this would be the equivalent for all our
exogenous knowledge (which I guess by definition would no longer be
exogenous).

It'd lend us an interesting peace of mind to know that any one of us
could rebuild the human enterprise from scratch if necessary!

I think Bryan's endeavour is a bit more realistic, btw.

-- 
Emlyn

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