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On the psychology of Artificial Intelligence

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Oilman:
Thinking about that last post, there is a clear implication that an AnthroPC or AI could indeed "die" in the sense of being permanently lost, if their chassis or server were destroyed and no uninstall/reinstall wizard run. Marten mentioned earlier (when Pintsize had a virus) that the reboot might, in effect, only restore Pintsize's memory to the back-up point on the CD - that it would be like reformatting a PC.

I don't doubt there would be Administrator over-rides - apart from anything else, since AIs and AnthroPC both seem to use the internet fairly freely, I'd guess that Idoru or someone similar would soon know, or form a pretty good idea of whether any given "identity" were functioning or not.

Half Empty Coffee Cup:
Realistically, one would think that AIs would regularly sync with a backup copy stored in cloud computing. It's what makes sense given the state of the internet and computers today.

DSL:
Given the whole debate over whether a copy of you is really you (as in, Star Trek Transporter), I wonder if an AI that considers itself "religious" might regard "me" as including "any copy of 'me', anywhere." Groundwork has been laid years ago in what was then cutting-edge SF, but (I've been away) I wonder it the topic's been explored beyond a story-ending hook that asks the question.

ReindeerFlotilla:
We don't know of any reason an AI couldn't be copied. There's no particular reason Pintsize couldn't download himself into all of the chassis in a PC store at once.

Except that he doesn't.

Jeph's extra canon explanation for AI is a combination of software and hardware that has emergent properties. The Wiki attempts to reconcile this with PS being sideloaded on a desktop PC, but there's really no reason to do that. Jeph's canon is whatever works for what he's writing now. He's contradicted himself before.

Since Momo's old chassis seemed "dead" we can speculate. Either Winslow is a bit too high strung. or transfering an AnthroPC to new Chassis involves moving hardware and software==some core module must be present for an AI to be I as well as A and their personalities are tied to individual modules, or it's simply illegal for AI's to run on multiple platforms at the same time (The last protects the canon of Pintsize's sideloading).

As for the killing... Does sleeping mean you die several times a night? We can pinpont the difference between dream times and simply unconscious times. Several times a night (or day, depending on when you sleep) you basically cease to exist. Yet you still think of you as you the next morning.

It's persistence of identity/continuity of experience. So long as the experience is continuous, you feel as if you are unchanged. (If our growing idea about what sleep is actually for are correct, you've actually changed more than you have at any other time during the day, but it doesn't feel that way.)

The same has to apply to an anthroPC. Their software side is nothing more than bits on a medium. If they optimize the bits, they have to copy a bit into memory, then copy it back to the media in a different location, then delete the original bit. By the "copying from one chassis to another logic" APCs would be killing themselves over and over when they defragged their hard drives. It makes sense to simply assume that as long as their experience is continuous, the question is moot. If Jeph ever has one AI running on two different platforms at the same time, the question will be come unmoot.

Half Empty Coffee Cup:
Religious AIs have been addressed... Momo used the phrase "distributed devotion". I would assume that such AIs would have their dormant backups running that. Or perhaps the state of dormancy a backup would have might be considered a form of meditation? I'm really just spitballing, here. No real clue.

Re: Does an anthroPC "sleeping" = death?

If you put your laptop on sleep mode, and bring it back up, everything you had open is still open. Compare with turning it off, where you have to open everything up again. There's a continuity with sleep mode.

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