[ExI] Problems of being an upload

[Mike Dougherty]

On Mon, Oct 8, 2012 at 4:30 PM, Giovanni Santostasi
<gsantostasi at gmail.com> wrote:
> But actually it is a good example of what it could mean to die in a uploaded
> universe. I'm sure the death, even for a relatively primitive and not
> super-safe system as World of Warcraft, was temporary.
> Once the hack was fixed the characters would be able to be recovered and go
> ahead and play again.

When you have a human player as caretaker of the game character you
can be sure someone will miss the uploaded-life and actively look for
it.  If your primary IS the uploaded life, where are you when there's
no CPU?  Restore backup you say?  which backup?  the most recent one
may or may not be patient zero that wiped out the universe in the
first place.

The lesson learned should be one of containment as much a security.
Sure you do everything you can to prevent the situation from becoming
critical.  As/if it becomes clear the situation is about to escape
control of the caretakers (whoever they may be) there needs to be
sufficient isolation from the rest of the ecosystem to prevent
full-blown catastrophe.  We call them viruses due to the success of
the biological equivalent - but we've not had millions of years to
develop equivalent immune systems.