Birds, bees, mind-wipes

David Stockhoff · 18 Nov 2011, 17:41 · from 2011-November.txt.gz

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From: dstockhoff at verizon.net (David Stockhoff)
Date: Fri, 18 Nov 2011 12:41:41 -0500
Subject: (urth) Birds, bees, mind-wipes
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On 11/18/2011 12:24 PM, James Wynn wrote:
>
> I would presume that the mindwipes and tweakings are far more 
> extensive chems than for humans. Chems are specifically programmed for 
> some useful activity. Marble is going to be fulfilled in cleaning and 
> service. At the same time, Hammerstone notes that chems enjoy the 
> smells of good food but can't eat it. Female chems wear perfume. They 
> practice their handwriting. What value would there be in programming 
> such character traits into a robot?

Editing a personality would be so much easier than creating a new one 
that might go insane if it's buggy. Imagine a Windows chem! But the 
scans would need to be "sanitized" or else chems would have been 
constantly rebelling and going back to find their spouses, children, 
parents, and lovers.

You'd have to cut out event-specific stuff like where a source was born, 
and leave the harmless functional stuff, whether it relates to "eating" 
or not. Especially, you'd have to cut out any memory of or need for 
sleep, or defecating, sex---especially for soldiers. Those things make 
humans neurotic and we CAN do them. If these desires are at least 
truncated, they might not be a problem.

So you could argue either way, but the fact is we know scanning exists 
and that you can plug a scan into a chem, while we don't know of any 
programmers. I don't recall how the talus-maker said he created talus 
personalities, but I'd guess these are fairly stripped-down programs 
loaded into low-capacity hardware and they just take it off the shelf. I 
bet he keeps a backup DOS floppy disk locked up in his office.

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