[ExI] Forking

[Keith Henson]

On Mon, Dec 26, 2011 at 5:00 AM,  Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:

big snip

> Forking is not necessarily driven by a drive to reproduce. It might be
> economic, it might be intellectual, it might even be religious - as soon
> as there is somebody with pro-forking views a lot of forking is likely
> unless the cost of computing space is very high.

To me this discussion has the flavor of banging your head on a wall or
putting beans up your nose.

I can see one reason to fork, when the copies are going off to where
they are out of contact, such as going to the stars in the Far Edge
Party scheme.  I suppose that would apply in the solar system or even
on earth with enough speedup to put copies out of contact.

Resources will always be limited.  Forking will on average cost a
person (or society) half the computation space they had.  So after a
fork, you run half as fast or are half as smart and half as rich.
Someone with a madness for forking will soon have no more hardware per
second than an Apple II.  There may be a lot of you, but at the rate
they think it hardly matters.

I can't think of any economic or intellectual reason that would not be
served equally well by spinning off a temporary thread that would
merge back in to the main stem.  As for the Church of the Fork . . . .

The inverse of forking is merging.  That could just as well become a
competing process or maybe even the dominate one for people who get
bored but don't want to exactly die.

Keith