A couple weeks ago, I did an in-game “book-signing” and interview in the Second-Life game-world. Wagner James Au, the Second Life “embedded reporter” who interviewed me, has posted the transcripts to the site, in two parts:
Part 1 and Part 2.
“That’s what the immortality in D&O is. You go to a backup kiosk and you decant a copy of yourself into a big storage cloud, and if you die — or even if you have a bad hangover, hell, why not — you have a force-grown clone, and you decant the consciousness into it and you off yourself. (Though [in the book] it’s dressed up in other language. That’s the existential view from today’s POV.)
“But everyone who gets squeamish about the euthanasia aspect just dies. Because they can’t use the backup-and-recover system. And there’s not a lot of social will to advance medical science beyond backup-and-recover, since it solves most every problem.
“It’s like [a medievalist’s view of] nutrition or hygiene. You may actually be right about the ‘ill humours’ that will invade you if you don’t smell like a bear’s [rear end]. But in the meantime, the people who bathe aren’t getting scabies and dying of infections started by the left-behind mouth-parts of dead ticks. And so everyone who thinks that way [about not bathing] ends up dead, and their ideas die with them. (A horribly simplified version of Darwinian mimetics, but you take my point.)
