From: Gordon Worley (redbird@rbisland.cx)
Date: Wed Aug 15 2001 - 07:15:51 MDT
At 12:34 AM +0000 8/15/01, Christian L. wrote:
>John Stick wrote:
>>Concerning the question of trade post-singularity, Christian L. >scoffed as
>>follows:
>>
>>> What kind of information/code can you not get from the Sysop?
>>
>>1) Any information/code protected by intellectual property rules
>
>The function of the Sysop is to give me what I want without
>violating the volition of others. Intellectual property rules are a
>way of saying: My wish is that you do not own this information/code.
>This is a request, but it violates my volition, because I want that
>information. The person I get it from is not harmed in any way by
>the fact that I can copy that information. Therefore intellectual
>property would probably not be allowed in the sysop scenario.
>Information would be free.
I think you are totally misunderstanding the Sysop.
To provide a wish granting service, ve is going to have to tax you in
computronium. Ve will come to you and say 'Hi, if you want me to
continue to grant you wishes, I need some computronium from you so
that I will have to resources to do that'. My guess is that the
Sysop is *only* going to be there as the intelligence of the system
of moral enforcement (well, or rights protection or whatever you'd
like to call it). Any other tasks will be left up to citizens.
This is a simple matter of resources. A good example of where this
exists today is health care. In the US, despite HMOs and such,
health care is pretty much a private thing. Most of the time people
can take care of themselves (colds, flus, etc.) and only seek the
help of a Power (the doctor) when they are really sick. Now, think
about health care in Canada. You pay x taxes to give the health care
system the resources it needs to function. Then, when you are sick,
the system is supposed to help you out. Alas, it doesn't quite work
like this. They simply can't charge enough taxes to take care of
everyone; it's an infrastructure problem. Only so many requests can
be processed at a time, no matter how much money the system has.
This will roughly be analogous with the Sysop. Sure, the Sysop
scales better, but as time goes on and people want bigger, better
wishes, it's going to get insane and we'll see queues filled with
backlogged wishes.
So, you have your own computronium and grant your own wishes.
Sometimes you might need help. This is where an economy develops
from. Grandma might not know how to construct her dream VR, so she
hires someone else to do it for her (using her resources). Also,
some minds might know what they want to do, but simply not have the
resources for it. So, they rent (think distributed computing) or buy
the resources of someone else.
As for IP laws, it all depends on what turns out to be the most
Friendly thing to do. My guess is that it is most Friendly for
information to be free, but that's just my hunch, I haven't really
looked deeply into the issue and don't really plan to in the near
future. So, stop worrying about it; we're too far away from being
post Singularity in Sysop Space to say anything useful about what IP
'laws' will be like then.
-- Gordon Worley `When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty http://www.rbisland.cx/ said, `it means just what I choose redbird@rbisland.cx it to mean--neither more nor less.' PGP: 0xBBD3B003 --Lewis Carroll
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