drethelin comments on Open thread, September 16-22, 2013 - Less Wrong

5 Post author: Metus 16 September 2013 05:18AM

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Comment author: [deleted] 18 September 2013 08:45:03PM 6 points [-]

"Hey Scott," I said. The technician was a familiar face, since I used the booths twice each day.

"Hey David," he replied. "Chicago Six?"

"Yup."

I walked into the booth, a room of sorts resembling an extremely small elevator, and the doors shut behind me. There was a flash of light, and I stepped out of the booth again--only to find that I was still at Scott's station in San Francisco.

"Shucks," said Scott. "The link went down, so the system sent you back here. So just wait a moment... oh shit. Chicago got their copy of you right before the link went down, so now there's one of you in Chicago, too."

"Well, uh... two heads are better than one, I guess?" I said.

"Yeah, here's what we do in this situation," said Scott, ignoring me. "We don't want two copies of you running around, so generally we just destroy the unwanted copy."

"Yeah... I guess that sounds like the way to go," I said.

"So yeah, just get back in the booth and we'll destroy this copy of you."

I stepped back into the booth again, and the doors closed. There was a fla--

Meanwhile, I was still walking to my office in Chicago, unaware that anything unusual had happened.

Comment author: drethelin 19 September 2013 06:17:24PM 4 points [-]

There are a lot of versions of this but very few stories that take advantage of the ability to cheaply copy someone dozens of times.

Comment author: 9eB1 22 September 2013 12:31:41AM *  3 points [-]

I recently read the source book for the Eclipse Phase pen and paper RPG, and in the flavor text it has the following description, describing the criminal faction "Pax Familiae":

PAX FAMILAE

Major Stations: Ambelina (Venus)

Though similar to the Night Cartel in that Pax Familae holds legal offices and outposts in several habitats while working underground in others, the difference between the two syndicates couldn’t be bigger. The entire Pax Familae organization goes back to one person, Claudia Ambelina, the syndicate’s founder and matriarch. Relying excessively on cloning and forking technologies, each individual member of the syndicate is a descendant or variant of Claudia. Biomorphs [any body that a mind can be put in] are cloned from Claudia’s original genetics or sexually produced offspring (thanks to sex-switching biomods), while egos [generally speaking, minds] are forks. All members are utterly loyal to Claudia (since they all are Claudia) and show their family affiliation with pride and arrogance. Individually, each remains slightly but notably different, though all are calculating and ambitious. Regular reassimilation of forks and XP updates are used to keep each variant aware of each of the other’s activities—once you’ve met one version of Claudia, the others will know you.

Needless to say, Eclipse Phase seems pretty awesome.

Comment author: gwern 22 September 2013 03:20:50AM 3 points [-]

Needless to say, Eclipse Phase seems pretty awesome.

You should read the Oracle AI sourcebook Sandberg wrote for it.

Comment author: 9eB1 22 September 2013 11:09:01AM 0 points [-]

Thanks for the tip, I probably would not have seen and been interested in reading that.

Comment author: [deleted] 21 September 2013 03:21:11PM 0 points [-]

And here I thought I'd had an original idea.

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