I was thinking the other day about the advent to true AI - an artificial mind, and that fraternal twin of a concept, uploading a human mind into a digital device.
When we have these, what are the criteria that determine if one copy of a digital mind is an individual? Making a new flesh person is a long process, and once made, their mind is their own thing. But a digital mind can be copied exactly to another unit (physical memory or whatever). Suppose digital minds are granted voting rights - what if they decide to replicate and register to vote? How could flesh minds ever win a democratic vote? Or should identical copies be considered just one mind, and any number of them count as just one "person"? But after a period of time, those copies would have different experiences and be different "people", would they not?
Just something to consider....
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Saturday, December 09, 2006
Tuesday, December 05, 2006
Look at what you have
Today I found myself somewhat nonplussed by the behavior of 2 cow-orkers who are not dumb, but did not appear to see the forest for the trees.
They were working on an attempt to get a 3rd party to provide a data set to us, for internal use, and were writing impassioned emails to said 3rd party to justify our asking for this data. When this was explained in my presence, I suggested that since a 2nd party was providing us with data that might reasonably include that info, we just get said 2nd party to give us the detailed format of their files (which we might already have), and we extract the desired info from those files.
They seemed rather stunned at this suggestion.
So the Ninja Developer learns from this: if you need some data, look at the data you already have, and see if what you want is what you already have.
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Software, SoftwareDevelopment, Computers, Programming
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They were working on an attempt to get a 3rd party to provide a data set to us, for internal use, and were writing impassioned emails to said 3rd party to justify our asking for this data. When this was explained in my presence, I suggested that since a 2nd party was providing us with data that might reasonably include that info, we just get said 2nd party to give us the detailed format of their files (which we might already have), and we extract the desired info from those files.
They seemed rather stunned at this suggestion.
So the Ninja Developer learns from this: if you need some data, look at the data you already have, and see if what you want is what you already have.
Technorati Tags --
Software, SoftwareDevelopment, Computers, Programming
HTTP
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