[ExI] The second step towards immortality

[Anders Sandberg]

On 2014-01-05 07:33, Martin Sustrik wrote:
> Btw, how would you even torture a virtual entity? 

By stimulating the right part of the somatosensory cortex or midbrain, 
or if you want to be more profound, the suffering-related subsets of the 
anterior cingulate. This might not work on a de novo AGI or radically 
altered posthuman, but brain emulations are just like human brains. And 
since plenty of us on the list want to escape mortality this way we have 
good reasons to ensure mindnapping and torture are hard.

>  Finally, trying to restrict copying is likely a futile affair -- see 
> the ongoing tragicomedy of the entertainment industry vs. the pirates.

Is that why nuclear launch codes, Walmart's customer/receipt database, 
and the contents of the Internal Models of major banks are on the Pirate 
Bay?

Restricting copying is easy if you design the system for it and the 
normal usage case does not involve zillions of untrusted agents having 
access. This is why DRM for media does not work, and why Wikileaks (and 
to some extent the Snowden leak) could happen. But beyond the revelation 
that the minuteman permissive action link codes were set to 0000000 no 
nuclear launch codes have leaked, the Walmart database is petabytes in 
size, and the bank models seem to be pretty safe (partially because you 
need to be a banker to understand what they are or why they are 
important, so you will not get enough seeders in your torrent).

Bitcoin is another model of preventing certain actions (double spending) 
on copyable data. Not sure anything like that approach can be used to 
make safe uploads, but it is an intriguing notion...

-- 
Dr Anders Sandberg
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford Martin School
Oxford University