Implants in Science Fiction

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Re: Implants in Science Fiction

Post by Dahak »

iPhones and the like also have the advantage that unlike a "normal" operating system, the developers have a far more stable hardware base to develop for and test on.
When you develop for a PC, there is so many different hardware combinations out there, with gazillion of drivers for it, that you can never completely test every combination.
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Re: Implants in Science Fiction

Post by AdmiralKanos »

Starglider wrote:
AdmiralKanos wrote:Is that the primary reason, or is it the fact that a cell-phone has an extremely simplistic operating system compared to a PC?
Not really. Iphone OS and Google Android are at least comparable to Windows 98, arguably more sophisticated.
Well yeah, but Windows 98 was a glorified DOS shell :) Windows XP is a far better OS than Windows 98 could have ever hoped to be, but that doesn't seem to slow down the exploits too much.

I suppose one could blame the Windows legacy problem in general, but there are exploits and security problems on all platforms, and in the case of something tied directly into your brain, we need to have a zero tolerance policy on exploits.
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Re: Implants in Science Fiction

Post by Starglider »

Darth Wong wrote:Trusting your life to software engineers, on the other hand, is one of those "out of your hands" kind of risks which is, IMO, inherently more scary.
Most people are ok with airliners, or for that matter prescription drugs, so clearly they are not inherently unwilling to take such risks.
Darth Wong wrote:A lot of sci-fi writers tend to assume that software will just become auto-magically super-reliable in the future. I'm not really sure why people so often assume this is reasonable.
It's possible. The obvious solution is to have all the software written by AIs. Alternatively, sufficiently advanced formal verification tools and methodologies would fix all the 'system' level issues, e.g. memory corruption, and there is considerable scope for better automated testing of compliance with functional specifications. So far escalation in the complexity of software systems, and particularly the functionality-to-cost ratio that consumers demand, has far outrun the scope of our verification methods. If and when they will catch up is a heated long-running debate - and the 'we'll fix it eventually' crowd is split between people proposing technical solutions and people proposing human/procedural solutions (unsurprisingly, I'm in the former group).
Xon wrote:For consumers, the major reason software is more reliable these days is there is actually enough processing power avaliable to build the software properly and almost 2 decades of experiance in how humans can fuckup programming.
You can trade processing power for reliability to a limited degree (i.e. pre-emptive multitasking, virtual memory, automatic memory management, virtual machines) but really all that can do is stop one software module from directly breaking unconnected modules. Automatic memory management does remove one important category of programmer errors, but that's pretty much as far as you can go with simple, processing-power-for-reliability trades (at the software level anyway). Experience is helpful, although software design knowledge doesn't seem to codify into textbooks as well as it does in most other engineering fields.
Dahak wrote:You can use formal verification of your algorithms and models, and thoroughly test it.
Very few programmers actually know how to do formal verification, and those that do tend to be expensive; it's mentally hard, as well as time consuming. Thus the potential for better tools and automation to implement theoretical techniques we already have.
Zixinus wrote:All for something that you can avoid just by putting the gizmo into a robust, external shell that can be powered and interface with stuff that soldiers already carry.
That said weight and bulk (of electronic gadgets in particular) are very serious problems for first world militaries. Implants may help a lot with that.
Samuel wrote:This is the old continuity of consciousness argument. Needless to say people really don't buy "it is an exact copy of you" because the origional (aka the one fitting the bill) will be dead.
The continuity flaw issue arises from a mismatch between human intuitive psychology and how the universe actually works. This is equivalent to the well documented discrepancies in human intuitive physics, such as believing that any unpowered object will inevitably lose speed and come to a rest, or that objects moved along a curved trajectory and then released will continue to curve.
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Re: Implants in Science Fiction

Post by Starglider »

AdmiralKanos wrote:Well yeah, but Windows 98 was a glorified DOS shell :) Windows XP is a far better OS than Windows 98 could have ever hoped to be, but that doesn't seem to slow down the exploits too much.
I said that cellphones now have processing power, internet connectivity and OSes equivalent to late 90s PCs, yet have a much lower rate of virus infection. The fact that Microsoft failed to even pretend to fix its security issues until quite recently is irrelevant. Very secure internet-capable operating systems (e.g. OpenBSD) have existed for over a decade, but have not been widely adopted, essentially because Microsoft had the developer base and massive marketing budget and they did not.
there are exploits and security problems on all platforms,
At rates varying by many orders of magnitude. I would expect people to care somewhat more security, reliability and general trustworthiness for companies who write software for their implants, although frankly after all those voting machine scandals, not that much more.
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Re: Implants in Science Fiction

Post by Dahak »

Starglider wrote:
Dahak wrote:You can use formal verification of your algorithms and models, and thoroughly test it.
Very few programmers actually know how to do formal verification, and those that do tend to be expensive; it's mentally hard, as well as time consuming. Thus the potential for better tools and automation to implement theoretical techniques we already have.
I know. I certainly wouldn't be able to do it right now ;)
But given that it will be not be within our lifetime that we program complex brain implants (that's why they're still sci-fi ;) ), I would like to think that the IT field will develop and grow in maturity over time, and such things are more commonplace than nowadays.
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Re: Implants in Science Fiction

Post by Grif »

David Weber's Empire of Man also addresses this issue, albeit briefly. One crewmember had his implants taken over by remote control and sabotages the ship carrying some prince into a backwater world. It didn't touch on this matter very much later. (although it was also mentioned the said prince got some kickass assasin program which made him an unstoppable killing machine with a gun.)

Apparently in their universe, hackers are still abound and firewalls and security protocols are still a must. :P
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Re: Implants in Science Fiction

Post by Formless »

Ford Prefect wrote:I kind of didn't want to get into this particular debate, but if you saved brainstate contains the some total of all your experiences, and is essentially a snapshot of everything about you at the time, what's the difference? If your memories and neurological make-up aren't the defining factor in what makes you you, what is?
So are you telling me that the saved brainstate will have all my memories up to and including remembering my death? Oh right, you said that it would only remember up till the moment when the saved state was made. Ergo, by your own criteria there is a difference between me and the clone of me you made. This has nothing to do with continuity of consciousness by the way, its an inherent limitation of the technique UNLESS you can upload me at the exact moment of my death (and perhaps even then).
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Re: Implants in Science Fiction

Post by phongn »

Starglider wrote:Not really. Iphone OS and Google Android are at least comparable to Windows 98, arguably more sophisticated.
I'd argue the "more sophisticated" part - iPhoneOS, Android, WinCE and probably a host of other mobile OSes are all at least as sophisticated as NT.
AdmiralKanos wrote:Well yeah, but Windows 98 was a glorified DOS shell :) Windows XP is a far better OS than Windows 98 could have ever hoped to be, but that doesn't seem to slow down the exploits too much.
Not to hijack the thread too much - but that's really not true. W9X only used DOS as a bootloader into the OS and ME even discarded with that. Everything else was handled internally.

As for exploits - there have been quite a few attempts against phones but they generally are locked down more tightly than their desktop brethren. iPhoneOS generally requires signed software from Apple to run, for example, and applications can be sandboxed so they can't touch anything else but their own little space. It's a bit harder to get malware on a system if you can't pop up a window saying "your computer may be infected, click me for XP AntiVirus 2007" or "nude pic click here!" or "kitten screensaver!" and get someone to then install a program.
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Re: Implants in Science Fiction

Post by Starglider »

Formless wrote:Ergo, by your own criteria there is a difference between me and the clone of me you made.
Your mistake is treating 'me' as an indivisible point entity. Human brains are actually pretty large, messy objects, and any reasonable conception of human consciousness is quite large in temporal extent as well (hundreds of milliseconds at minimum; self-awareness is arguably integrated over a span of seconds). Obviously future yous and past yous are pretty different; even five minutes into the future, there won't be any direct correspondance in dynamic state (i.e. pattern of firing neurons). Humans are really fairly fuzzy things, so any criterion of 'me-ness' must be a complex similarity measure, rather than a boolean property. You can try and narrow it down by playing games with causality connectivity etc, but trust me, it doesn't work - you'll end up throwing your arms in the air and shouting 'but... but... I know I'm me!' over and over again.
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Re: Implants in Science Fiction

Post by TheLostVikings »

Formless wrote:
Ford Prefect wrote:I kind of didn't want to get into this particular debate, but if you saved brainstate contains the some total of all your experiences, and is essentially a snapshot of everything about you at the time, what's the difference? If your memories and neurological make-up aren't the defining factor in what makes you you, what is?
So are you telling me that the saved brainstate will have all my memories up to and including remembering my death? Oh right, you said that it would only remember up till the moment when the saved state was made. Ergo, by your own criteria there is a difference between me and the clone of me you made. This has nothing to do with continuity of consciousness by the way, its an inherent limitation of the technique UNLESS you can upload me at the exact moment of my death (and perhaps even then).
No one have mentioned clones except you. Ford was talking about doing a "windows restore" style rollback on your memories if a malfunctioning implant corrupted your brain. Thus it could be entirely possible that they performed the memory restore on your original brain. At no point in the scenario did your original body have to die, and your original memories would still reside in your original brain.

Sure, you might lose a day or two depending on how often you did backups, but then again, certain people already do that by drinking to much.

If you had a ghost-in-the-shell style cyberbrain it would make sense to do a memory upload every night while you are asleep, unless it would interfere with REM sleep or something. That way you'd never lose more than a couple hours if you managed to catch a virus, etc.
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Re: Implants in Science Fiction

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By Formless's argument, anyone who take a sufficient dose of ketamine, rohypnol, propofol, or even a good old garden variety alcohol bender will cease to be themselves and become a clone of themselves on recovering consciousness.
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Re: Implants in Science Fiction

Post by Zixinus »

That said weight and bulk (of electronic gadgets in particular) are very serious problems for first world militaries. Implants may help a lot with that.
Depends on the nature of the gizmo, but sometimes weight and bulk is a preferable trade-off to all the problems I've outlined before: reliability, security, re-usability, implantation & maintenance costs, logistics, quality control etc.

That said, in my setting some people DO get implants when deemed necessary or worth the risks and costs; its just that most militarise prefer not to, especially not for the average soldier, as its cheaper and any army is anything but a little cheapskates because they want to save the money for stuff that matter more than individual soldier's stuff: tanks, helicopters, fuel, ammo, etc.

If the cost of large-scale transplants come down enough and the technology matures enough that the cost of the two are closely comparable, then probably, sure, implants will become more commonplace.
However, implants will likely will always require more attention, if not price, than just making a portable version of the same gadget, unless its something that is very body-specific, like something that would make a soldier stronger (exoskeleton vs. increasing the density of bones, yeah).

Nigh-vision goggles for example: currently, the next generation of them will combine both IR and starlight scopes. To do the same to the human eye, as far as I am aware, can only be done by losing sharpness or colour quality of the person. The human eye is a pretty sensitive organ and so far you will have to replace it if you want to present an alternative. If you fuck up or the implanted eye or just eye-part is defective or damaged, you have effectively lost a soldier: a soldier that cannot see, cannot aim with his weapon and thus cannot fight.

However, there is no such risk with IR/starlight goggles. Furthermore, you can have far greater performance/image quality with a nightvision goggles because you don't have the limitations of the human eye to work with.

Besides, miniaturization, new materials, unified design of gear and further refinements of existing technologies can also reduce weight and bulk. Implants are hardly the only alternative.
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Re: Implants in Science Fiction

Post by ThomasP »

Formless wrote:
Ford Prefect wrote:I kind of didn't want to get into this particular debate, but if you saved brainstate contains the some total of all your experiences, and is essentially a snapshot of everything about you at the time, what's the difference? If your memories and neurological make-up aren't the defining factor in what makes you you, what is?
So are you telling me that the saved brainstate will have all my memories up to and including remembering my death? Oh right, you said that it would only remember up till the moment when the saved state was made. Ergo, by your own criteria there is a difference between me and the clone of me you made. This has nothing to do with continuity of consciousness by the way, its an inherent limitation of the technique UNLESS you can upload me at the exact moment of my death (and perhaps even then).
As far as I am concerned, if something has scrambled my brain, then the new instance of my backup mind-state is still me.

Just because one fork of me is missing some time isn't terribly critical as far as I'm concerned.

In fact, without resorting to a soul or other religious arguments, I can't actually see why people are so married to this notion that you can't conceivably back up a brain, because "it's not you".
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Re: Implants in Science Fiction

Post by folti78 »

phongn wrote:As for exploits - there have been quite a few attempts against phones but they generally are locked down more tightly than their desktop brethren. iPhoneOS generally requires signed software from Apple to run, for example, and applications can be sandboxed so they can't touch anything else but their own little space. It's a bit harder to get malware on a system if you can't pop up a window saying "your computer may be infected, click me for XP AntiVirus 2007" or "nude pic click here!" or "kitten screensaver!" and get someone to then install a program.
To add to this, the developer tools(Software Development Kit - SDK) for the various phone/OS families are harder to get* and install than a Windows developer suite**. Also developer information about the systems are not as public as the various Windows APIs (and the ways you could exploit them). Testing your malware on a real phone could result in an expensive brick if you fuck up***, which may need specialist tools and knowledge to fix, compared to mass cloning/restoring from backup of PCs over a network, which is a pretty simple and well known operation after you set up the infrastructure to do it.

Plus it's a "tad" more difficult to build your mobile network to test your malware's propagation than hooking up some used PCs in your basement. :wink:

* sometimes coming with specialized "developer edition" hardware for testing.
** Which you can get from the nearest "torrent store" if all else fails.
*** if it allows uploading software from a computer.
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Re: Implants in Science Fiction

Post by TheLostVikings »

Zixinus wrote: Nigh-vision goggles for example: currently, the next generation of them will combine both IR and starlight scopes. To do the same to the human eye, as far as I am aware, can only be done by losing sharpness or colour quality of the person. The human eye is a pretty sensitive organ and so far you will have to replace it if you want to present an alternative. If you fuck up or the implanted eye or just eye-part is defective or damaged, you have effectively lost a soldier: a soldier that cannot see, cannot aim with his weapon and thus cannot fight.

However, there is no such risk with IR/starlight goggles. Furthermore, you can have far greater performance/image quality with a nightvision goggles because you don't have the limitations of the human eye to work with.

Besides, miniaturization, new materials, unified design of gear and further refinements of existing technologies can also reduce weight and bulk. Implants are hardly the only alternative.
There is also the half-way solution, the few persons today who actually have had their sight restored by implants have the implants itself only act as a receiver, having to interface with an external camera to get the actual visual data. So if you had an small implant in your visual cortex/optical-nerves/retina/whatever that could communicate with your nightvision goggles you could simply mount your large IR collecting lenses on your forehead instead of in front of your eyes. Thus they would not block your line of sight and could enable you to switch back and forth between the two inputs more rapidly than you could possibly take on/off an actual set of goggles. If advanced enough the implant might even let you view both visual feeds at the same time, layed on top of each other, or otherwise integrated in some way.

You could mount small cameras behind your rifle scopes, enabling you to fire while completely behind cover, around corners, etc, while still allowing you to easily remove them and use them normally with your Mk.I eyeball if you wanted. Meaning in a lot of situations where your unmodified soldier wouldn't just have lost his sight, but actually be dead, your implant-having soldier could very well still be alive and kicking.


The first cochlear implants were not as good as the ones we have today, and the ones we have today will probably be inferior to the ones they have in a few years time, but even though the process does enough damage during installation that they can never be upgraded in the future, people still do it. Simply because they think it's better than the alternative. And if the cochlear implants we have 50 years in the future could grant better hearing than natural ears, then even if they would be a slight inconvenience some perfectly healthy people would probably opt to get them anyhow. Finally a bluetooth headset that I will never forget to bring with me!

But more seriously: It doesn't matter if the 1st generation implants are perfect simply because the ones who will opt to have them installed are not people who had perfect senses to begin with. And since the ones working their asses of in order to try to return the senses to those who have lost them will never be satisfied until they have made implants that grant the same fidelity as the original biological version, it is imho inevitable that we eventually will get implants sophisticated enough that some people will opt to get them even though they had no disabilities to begin with. So in my mind it is not a question of if, but rather when. Which sadly will probably not be in my lifetime. Though you never know...
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Re: Implants in Science Fiction

Post by Formless »

Starglider wrote:
Formless wrote:Ergo, by your own criteria there is a difference between me and the clone of me you made.
Your mistake is treating 'me' as an indivisible point entity. Human brains are actually pretty large, messy objects, and any reasonable conception of human consciousness is quite large in temporal extent as well (hundreds of milliseconds at minimum; self-awareness is arguably integrated over a span of seconds). Obviously future yous and past yous are pretty different; even five minutes into the future, there won't be any direct correspondance in dynamic state (i.e. pattern of firing neurons). Humans are really fairly fuzzy things, so any criterion of 'me-ness' must be a complex similarity measure, rather than a boolean property. You can try and narrow it down by playing games with causality connectivity etc, but trust me, it doesn't work - you'll end up throwing your arms in the air and shouting 'but... but... I know I'm me!' over and over again.
Excuse me, but did you just try to criticize an argument I never made?

Why yes, yes you did. :roll:

My point was that if your criteria for saying whether or not someone is "you" is whether or not they have your memories, moods, etc. then its futile to try and argue that a clone based on a saved state of you from the past is you because it lacks the full set of characteristic properties of the dead person. If anything, you're just confirming that argument.
TheLostVikings wrote:No one have mentioned clones except you.
If you die, and someone puts a "saved state" of your mind in a body and turns you on, what the fuck else would you call that? You are aware that if you have the technology to make uploaded saved states then you can easily make multiple copies, right?
[...] it could be entirely possible that they performed the memory restore on your original brain.
So? I thought the whole purpose of Ford's argument was that the body is not what defines the person? If so, then what matters is the information that was copied, NOT which body it ends up being stored in.
At no point in the scenario did your original body have to die, and your original memories would still reside in your original brain.
Except that isn't what Ford was talking about. Now who's bringing up new concepts no one else was talking about? :roll:
Terralthra wrote:By Formless's argument, anyone who take a sufficient dose of ketamine, rohypnol, propofol, or even a good old garden variety alcohol bender will cease to be themselves and become a clone of themselves on recovering consciousness.
That would be a weakness of Ford's definition of what a person is, not my argument.
As far as I am concerned, if something has scrambled my brain, then the new instance of my backup mind-state is still me.

Just because one fork of me is missing some time isn't terribly critical as far as I'm concerned.

In fact, without resorting to a soul or other religious arguments, I can't actually see why people are so married to this notion that you can't conceivably back up a brain, because "it's not you".
That's your prerogative, I guess. I have not made a moral argument, merely a metaphysical one, and I would tend to agree that from the perspective of the cloned mind it doesn't matter much what the exact mental state of its predecessor was.
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Re: Implants in Science Fiction

Post by Terralthra »

Formless wrote:
Terralthra wrote:By Formless's argument, anyone who take a sufficient dose of ketamine, rohypnol, propofol, or even a good old garden variety alcohol bender will cease to be themselves and become a clone of themselves on recovering consciousness.
That would be a weakness of Ford's definition of what a person is, not my argument.
Formless wrote:So are you telling me that the saved brainstate will have all my memories up to and including remembering my death? Oh right, you said that it would only remember up till the moment when the saved state was made. Ergo, by your own criteria there is a difference between me and the clone of me you made. This has nothing to do with continuity of consciousness by the way, its an inherent limitation of the technique UNLESS you can upload me at the exact moment of my death (and perhaps even then).
If you drink enough alcohol (or take a sufficient dose of any of the other drugs I listed), you will have a period of experiences which you will not remember after recovering from said substances. The you after your hangover subsides is different from the you before you pass out in exactly the same way as the saved brainstate is different from you.
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Re: Implants in Science Fiction

Post by Formless »

Terralthra, what's your goddamn point? Do you know what an "argument" is, or are you just going to keep repeating the obvious?
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Re: Implants in Science Fiction

Post by Terralthra »

Well, I presumed that your initial post was presenting some sort of objection to the concept of losing a few memories, being that you made it seem as if that would fundamentally make you a different person, and pointing out that on those grounds, I hope you've never been drunk and that you refuse all general anesthesia. If that wasn't your point, then you appear to have made a post about how losing a memory or two "makes you a clone" without having any purpose in doing so. Was that not an objection? If it was not, what the fuck was your point in the first place?
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Re: Implants in Science Fiction

Post by Formless »

My point was to show that even if you assume Ford's definition of a person were true you still couldn't say that the mind-clone is the same person. I don't necessarily agree with that definition, and for the exact reason you just gave, but that does NOT disprove my argument assuming the premise were true. You are appealing to the consequences, and I hope you know that will get you nowhere.
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Re: Implants in Science Fiction

Post by TheLostVikings »

Formless wrote:
TheLostVikings wrote:No one have mentioned clones except you.
If you die, and someone puts a "saved state" of your mind in a body and turns you on, what the fuck else would you call that? You are aware that if you have the technology to make uploaded saved states then you can easily make multiple copies, right?
Are you trying to be dense on purpose or are you really this fucking retarded? Here is the exchange that started this particular discussion:
Ford Prefect wrote:
MKSheppard wrote: Now, would you want to try nuking and reinstalling something intimately connected to your brain?
Is this some sort of trap question? It entirely depends on the actual maturity of the technology. Implants aren't going to exist in a vacuum; by the time they exist on a commercial market, uploading and downloading of personalities could well be hopelessly trivial, so even if you somehow managed to completely erase your brain your insurance company could just load up an older brain state that you recorded fairly recently.
Notice the word "reinstall", if you are downloading your memories into a new body you are NOT reinstalling anything, just plain installing something. Which means anyone who is not fucking retarded can easily see that they are talking about rolling back your memories in your original brain in the case you screwed something up (i.e. a virus, etc). There is absolutely no mention of clones anywhere until you came along with your retarded strawman bullshit.
Formless wrote: So? I thought the whole purpose of Ford's argument was that the body is not what defines the person? If so, then what matters is the information that was copied, NOT which body it ends up being stored in.
Your entire strawman fallacy point was that his memories wouldn't make him himself if he downloaded them into a clone body, yet at no point did he ever mention anything about a clone body anywhere, just restoring his own original memories from a backup into his own original brain. Thus there would obviously be no clone body anywhere, just Fords memories and Fords personality in Fords fucking brain. Now riddle me this: If he has his memories, his personality, his brain, his body. Why the fuck isn't he Ford? What super magical piece is missing?
Formless wrote:
TheLostVikings wrote:At no point in the scenario did your original body have to die, and your original memories would still reside in your original brain.
Except that isn't what Ford was talking about. Now who's bringing up new concepts no one else was talking about? :roll:
Easy to answer: You are. As already shown above no one mentioned clones before you came in with your strawman bullshit. So take your smugness and kindly go fuck yourself :roll:
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Formless
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Re: Implants in Science Fiction

Post by Formless »

TheLostVikings wrote:Are you trying to be dense on purpose or are you really this fucking retarded? Here is the exchange that started this particular discussion:

*snip*

Notice the word "reinstall", if you are downloading your memories into a new body you are NOT reinstalling anything, just plain installing something. Which means anyone who is not fucking retarded can easily see that they are talking about rolling back your memories in your original brain in the case you screwed something up (i.e. a virus, etc). There is absolutely no mention of clones anywhere until you came along with your retarded strawman bullshit.
The only difference between installing and reinstalling something is that when re-installing something it already was at one point in time installed in that hardware. If you will read that yourself, they are clearly talking about a situation where your mind has been completely erased from the brain. By the definition of a person Ford later gives, that process could rightfully be called cloning. He even uses the word "copy" for fucks sake, you complete illiterate!
Your entire strawman fallacy point was that his memories wouldn't make him himself if he downloaded them into a clone body
Stop right here. Again, the one strawmanning is you: my point was that if the mindstate of the person being re-uploaded into the brain is from a time preceding the creation of new memories, then by his definition of a person that copy is not 100% the same as the original person. IF you can get a mindstate that is very recent, say yesterday, it will be more you than one from, say, a week ago.
Easy to answer: You are. As already shown above no one mentioned clones before you came in with your strawman bullshit. So take your smugness and kindly go fuck yourself :roll:
They don't have to mention it for it to be a necessary step in the process they were describing, you fuckwit.
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Re: Implants in Science Fiction

Post by Starglider »

Formless wrote:My point was that if your criteria for saying whether or not someone is "you" is whether or not they have your memories, moods, etc. then its futile to try and argue that a clone based on a saved state of you from the past is you because it lacks the full set of characteristic properties of the dead person.
A backup from one day ago will have more memories, attitudes and general brain state in common than an instance of you one month in the past, or the future. It is illogical to say that a future you with the same brain state as you minus one day is somehow less you than a future or past you separated by one month of normal drift. Ironically, if you were a (sapient) AI with total recall this argument would be much more valid. For humans, the information loss caused by a one day discontinuity is relatively minor compared to the ongoing massive lossage caused by our highly selective and bandwidth-limited memory encoding.
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Re: Implants in Science Fiction

Post by Vendetta »

AdmiralKanos wrote:
Starglider wrote:Just look at the rate of virus infection on cellphones; modern smartphones have as much computing power as a PC of ten years ago, but virus penetration is much much lower, due to more secure design. The primary reason the PC platform has so many viruses is that it's built out of legacy crap, largely by criminal incompetents (e.g. most Microsoft developers).
Is that the primary reason, or is it the fact that a cell-phone has an extremely simplistic operating system compared to a PC?
It's a question of infection vectors. Up to now, most mobiles didn't execute a lot of content, so there were fairly few open vectors to infect a phone OS, the only way it would really happen was with things like java applets, and they had to spread locally via bluetooth connections.

Now that phones have browsers it might be easier to infect them via the same type of drive-by download execution and trojan packaging that gets so many Windows PCs. It depends on how secure the browsers are.
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Re: Implants in Science Fiction

Post by loomer »

What about dystopian sci-fi, Shep? How do you feel about their use of heavy cybernetics?

I know one of my dystopian worlds has government mandated implants (tracking and control tags, along with kill switches) despite the risks of installing them, since they're so ideal for keeping a civilian populace under control and keeping down resistance movements.

The rest of the setting, incidentally, has cybernetics in a more voluntary capacity - in about three areas. One, you've got transhumanists who want that shit anyway. Two, you've got people on Earth and other rich worlds with access to the very best surgeons and aftercare, for whom it's generally quite safe to undergo the procedures. And the third is military personnel who lose limbs or functions in the line of duty or consent to implantation for combat or employment purposes (normally it's a mix of the two. If a guy gets a leg blown off when a mass driver slug tears his frigate open, he'll want a replacement, and since he's getting one he may as well have the other leg swapped out for military grade hardware as well. A tech might lose a hand and have a multitool and flashlight included in his new one, and so forth.)

That's not to say I ignore the risks with it - immunosuppression drugs are vital for about 10% of recipients, especially those with 'core' implants (things like a datajack interfacing directly into live greymatter or spinal cord as opposed to a cybernetic arm or leg.) and away from the rich colonies a good 1 in 100 operations might go wrong in a major way, but I do want them present in at least some capacity.
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