I've been checking the buzz around Cyberpunk 2077 - anyone familiar with the RPG it's based on? Is it a variation of that Shadowrun-Universe?
What really intrigues me is Keanu Reeves' character Jonny Silverhand - apparently a sort of KI/digitized personality that your game-character slots into their 'neurointerfaceblarghwhatever', and who your game-character can see/interact with. It seems to go back to that old 'Dixie Flatline' idea of William Gibson's from Neuromancer, and some of the discussions I've seen cover the same themes touched on in that old howler from '83, like: 'What is a human being in the first place?' 'Is it possible to fully transplant a personality into an artificial medium - or is the 'personality' merely a something that is very good at faking the reactions of the person in question, but beyond that, 'there's nobody home'?' Etc.etc.
IIRC, Neuromancer very briefly explored those theme - Case (the novel protagonist, not yours truly) ask the Ghost of his former mentor how real it is, to which the Dixie Flatline-construct replies something along the lines that it feels like it is really Dixie the person, but that Case probably shouldn't hang around and wait for it to start composing an opera.
I like that kind of "Philosophical SF" - though, tbh, the only examples I would know off are Gibson's stuff from the 80s and 90s (Sprawl-trilogy & Bridge-trilogy) and, of course, GiTS.
P.S.: I got a new "Philosophical SF question" (in case any of you is a writer, or likes discussing that kind of stuff):
Is the Turing test really any good at what it was supposed to do? We've already seen Twitter-bots that have tricked people (although one could argue that the Twitter-interface significantly constrains the bandwidth of even textual interaction, that those were people who were very excited (angry), were expecting a certain narrow range of interactions that the bots were trained to navigate, most of the humans who were tricked likely weren't aware that bots of that sophistication existed, and hence didn't consider the possibility etc.) So how good are humans really as judges of intelligence?
And if it turns out that we aren't a very good as judges of intelligence - yet the sole currently known example - what is intelligence then, and how would we spot it when it drops by to say hi and snarf a cigarette? (**)
What if it turns out that only a handful of us have the capacity to reliably spot an intelligent entity? What if that became a bona-fide employment? What if it those state-certified intelligence spotters completely freaked out and told us that a significant part of humanity, let's say 10% or so, are actually ... not really what we think of as human, but that some were more like 'philosophical zombies'?
Would we believe them, or would that be too terrible to accept? If we did - how would we treat our 'simpler brethren' (History is full of nightmarrish examples in that respect - think e.g. what the Nazis had planned for Poles & Russians)? Is intelligence even a crucial requirement for being human - if so, would that mean that more intelligent people more human? (Or maybe the other way round: What if intelligence and empathy are orthogonal, and empathy is the more important quality? What if it turned out that there's a subset of humanity with really high IQs, but ... there's nobody home in their brainbox?)
Or more prosaic: How would we know that the intelligence-spotters always tell the truth? What if some of them lied about specific persons they tested being fully intelligent - e.g. what if it became known that some of those intelligence spotters take bribes? etc.etc.
(**) What if it so turns out that we can create intelligence - even intelligence far more capable that we are - but there's still nobody home? Nothing even remotely resembling a person, not even a mammal - more something like a corral? There's neural networks that learned to play Go far beyond human capacity inside of days - and IIRC, those were simultaneously a major step in the 'general purpose Intelligence' - but they won't say hi or snarf a cigarette from you any time soon. Maybe there's a kind of tradeoff between intelligence and personhood?
