Kil’n people
I’m in the middle of ‘Kil’n people’ by David Brin and it’s a great book. Once again it’s dealing with the issue of downloading/uploading minds/memories/souls (whatever).
(in this on you can download your mind to clay golems so they do what you don’t want to do in the flesh. At the end of its short one day life, you can download the memories of the golem, or avoid to do it if the memories are unpleasant. But what happens when golems start to live longer, or to copy to other golems?)
Brin doesn’t try to avoid the questions and difficulties raised by the whole mind upload idea, which makes it a must-read.
September 3rd, 2003 at 13:22
“Brin doesn’t try to avoid the questions and difficulties” : exactly, and I would even tell more, as Dupond/t : I would love to write “compare with the usual academic production about that”, but it would imply you reading it, something you may really avoid. Anyway, Brin’s is true social-historical research, while academics do believe they are able to frame “the problem” as if it could be described independantly of its concrete setting. Problems and difficulties are not “the” subject of the book, this is good fiction, but are “in” the subject, just as new problems and difficulties linked with new technologies always “in” concrete situations. It is like in his Earth (fat) novel : it happens in a future many of us will have a chance to know, and never, in between has mankind confronted “the” problem : about everthing has changed but with no “cut”, on a day by day way. In Kiln also : “dittos” are already “routine”, with a whole world of habits and legal “small” innovations which produced a nice new “normality”. This, at last, is truly (social)science fiction, while social (academic) sciences are…. (expletive deleted)