[ThomasBombadil]

Consider the idea that this is a vector into the idea of machines being possibly equally important, or considered even more important than living humans, based on their capacity to accurately represent the continued presence of deceased humans.

That a machine is permitted to occupy and consume resources, that might otherwise be used by actual living people who are also trying to live meaningful lives. Which one wins?

[codecamper]

no worries. The human emulator uses just 1% of a 2050 EC2 mini compute instance.

[ThomasBombadil]

So, if the distributed hardware infrastructure cluster supporting 10,000 EC2 mini compute instances is packed with 1,000,000 emulations of humans, how important are the physical data centers that encompass all their backups, master copies and live instances?

[loup-vaillant]

As important as a city hosting 1,000,000 people. No more, no less.

The emulation of a human is a human.

[ThomasBombadil]

I disagree. Less important, and no more important than a public library filled with books. It'd be a shame if it burned down, but the books are not the humans that wrote them. Those are long gone.

[sbilstein]

The occasional stuttering is actually due to GC pauses.

[Qwertious]

This is a scary thought: What language will people be written in? Imagine if you were stuck in an emulator written in Java.

I'd be a little bit afraid of being in an emulator written in C++ that makes heavy use of Boost, though.

[toomuchtodo]

That takes me back to Max Headroom!

[coldtea]

This thread takes me back to Reddit.