Imagine this: you’ve “dated” 600 people in San Fransisco without having typed a word to any of them. Instead, a busy little bot has completed the mindless ‘getting-to-know-you’ chatter on your behalf, and has told you which people you should actually get off the couch to meet.
The memes are becoming real. 
This reminds me of a concept from Eclipse Phase. The normal mode of travel in the solar system is to upload your mind as data and squirt it across space to a receiving ship or station where you’re download and either instanced as software or written in to a meat or cybernetic brain. then you do your business, upload as data, and get transmitted home (don’t ask about continuity of consciousness it makes people very uncomfortable). If you just need to ask some quick questions or perform very limited functions, especially if you suspect someone could intercept your mind, crack the encryption, and sift through your brain you might send a severely pruned down “fork” of yourself that has been edited to only have specific knowledge and expertise. Depending on how much pruning you do the fork could be a nearly full copy of yourself with a few parts missing or a sub-sentient expert system that can only perform specific tasks. Regardless, the bandwidth costs are cheaper and the risk of being intercepted and wrung out for information is less.
Also, this is how OkCupid used to work, but with buzzwords. OKC just asked you a bunch of quiz questions and their importance to you, then matched you with people with similar values and beliefs. Worked great. No swiping, no AI. It still sucked, but it sucked and order of magnitude less than modern skinner box dating sites.
See the thing about comparing it to a cool thing is that this isn’t really like the cool thing at all.
Oh it’s horrific in Eclipse Phase. What happens when you turn your mind in to a stream of ones and zeroes while nanites scrub you out of the brain you were in? Is whatever is downloaded at the other end really you? What if your transmission is corrupted in transit? What will be left of you? What if someone intercepts your transmission, instances a copy of you, hacks in to your mind and changes your personality, then sends the modified you to the end destination with no one the wiser? Eclipse Phase is very emphatically a cosmic horror story.
Barclay was right I ain’t getting in that fucking thing
Barclay? Shit, McCoy said it best when he told the female yeoman that he insisted on them beaming up first, "said something about first ‘seeing how it scrambled our molecules.’ "
And he said that just after two people got fried in the transporter!
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
It’s funny because you linked to the episode which demonstrates very conclusively that being Transported doesn’t even break continuity of consciousness as you stay aware through the entire process and even “see” subspace in the limited capacity your energized pattern can perceive things
I mean yeah, but we only know he was wrong because of omniscient TV plot contrivance
He was right to not trust the soma machine
If there’s anyone we should take cues from it’s the guy who made holograms of his co-workers to act out power fantasies with and presumably fuck sometimes
Yeah, Star Trek gets real goofy with it. You don’t get broken down and re-constructed, you get turned in to, idk, some weird energy being for a bit then turned back to normal matter at your destination.
Altered Carbon has a lot of the same weird issues. although I enjoyed it, it kinda handwaves over themEDIT: I don’t remember well enough, I think the problems are fundamental to transfer of consciousness and fwiw you have to make some choices to bridge those contradictions. I’ll have to re-read it to articulate it, so I’m striking it.
I feel like the addressed it pretty head on. Every copy of you is equally you. That is the materialist explanation we would expect.
I’ve only read the first book, I should re-read it but I remember having some problems with the way the backups worked. good story though
Isn’t the materialist explanation that you die every time but it doesn’t matter because the ‘you’ doesn’t really exist?
Kinda. Once your brain is copied to a chip yeah. After that once it is just a pattern of data then it is just as continuous as you perceive it to be.
Yeah i’m not sure if “losing continuity of consciousness means you died” is a cultural thing that can change or what. Bc people do lose continuity all the time when they black out, go under for surgery, get concussed, and so forth. Subjectively when you come to you feel like you’re the same person and continuity is maintained, and people don’t perceive themselves to have died. But is the mind that boots up after surgery the same mind that was shut down? It gives me the willies.
Or sleep. It can’t really be avoided.
I’m gonna clone your ego into a bunch of catfish and do a roko’s basilisk on you.
I miss old OKC. Match turned it into another swiping app.
severing the continuity of one’s consciousness and opening your brain-clones to horrific tampering just to save the lag of the return trip is the most computer science thing imaginable
Just don’t think of your fork’s human rights when “pruning” it.
Eclipse Phase is so cool I wish the system was better.