In the scenario of some secret organization whisking me to some underground laboratory, I think I would feel a little conflicted until they rolled back my memories to before the crash and replaced my car.
I find it highly unlikely that they would set me loose with such knowledge.
I’d start looking for Sarah Connor.
I think I’d set down to enjoying myself in earnest, before Skynet’s embedded programming takes over, and I am compelled to go search for Sarah Connor.
Seriously though, I’ve always found it more interesting to wonder what the consequences would be of being the product of a super-soldier genetic engineering program; we’d be flesh and blood like everyone else, just more robust or something.
I would hope that I wouldn’t be paying punitive medical insurance costs. If I’m experimental I shouldn’t have to pay for it. I can only imagine what replacement parts would cost.
I would also expect not to have to suffer PMS, the 'flu, allergies.
Oh yeah, I want a really great set of tits out of this deal. No cyborg should have suffer with saggy tits.
Do you think cyborgs would be subject to becoming zombies during the zombie apocalypse? Would you be half zombie, half robot?
I think you’ve got that exactly backwards. Meat expecting reincarnation or afterlife or some such is dead silly. It might make sense for primitive tribesmen to believe such stuff, but not now.
But as a machine I can easily see how my “me-ness” could be transferred intact into a replacement machine. In a scenario where sentient machines were commonplace I’d expect to be able to buy this service with no more difficulty than buying a car. The fact I’m a secret prototype could pose large, perhaps insurmountable obstacles. But at very worst I’m in the same situation as all my meat-based neighbors.
Some folks above pointed out that the secret agency could have installed a secret kill switch and that you’re at their mercy. Hint: if you’re a meat-dude working for a seriously secret agency doing sersiously secret shit, you’re already in a position where you’re at their mercy. The good news is as long as you play the game, you’re more useful alive than dead. The same would be true of a machine. Then again, come retirement time they might just choose to switch you off. Certainly Corporate America would much prefer to off their former employees to avoid paying out on pension benefits & retiree medical coverage.
Just to narrow down the hypotheticals:
Your “vessel” is entirely human, probably cloned from an anonymous donor, or the donor DNA slightly altered to give you a unique appearance. Forget about titanium bones and what not, let’s assume your skeleton is human as well.
The only parts of you that are truly machine, is your brain, and your nervous system. Somewhere just beyond that, the machine part of you, interfaces seamlessly with the meat part of you.
You know you are being monitored remotely by a technology you absolutely don’t understand. There could be a kill switch, but you don’t know; I’d say it’s stupid not to assume, though. They know every time you go in for a procedure that might reveal your true nature, and have set up doctors and surgeons who are ‘in-the-know’ in your life for whatever may come your way as far as your human elements. In the case of an emergency, such as this, you have always been closely followed by a human detail.
They didn’t erase your memories, when that would’ve been the best contingency for this operation. This should tell you that they don’t have the means, or perhaps it’s impossible to tamper with your memories.
It’s safe to assume that whatever machine that is running your AI, is so complex as to almost program itself, not unlike a human brain. If you were, after all, grown from a fetus, this would lead me to assume my “brain” is employing some organic-type algorithms to gradually enter into consciousness. If my memories are fictionalized and implanted, then why couldn’t they remove the memories in which they don’t want me to have and threaten the termination of me and my family?
Interesting question.
However, if this is the case:
then, wouldn’t the designers be able to “re-program” the brain to eliminate memories of the event and/or subsequent revelation?
My first thought would be “Awesome!”
I’m very surprised that I’m the first one to think that.
Yay! Fix the blood pressure, allergies, anxiety, and depression problems while you’re at it, will you? I’m pretty sure the last couple must be programming bugs that you could patch.
I think I’m at a good place in my life to have a kid soon. Can I put my order in for a cyborg kid now? Presumably, the old-fashioned way wouldn’t work for a cyborg. Oh, and if you could give it to me already toilet-trained and able to talk and read, that would be nice. It should be possible for a cyborg to do those things from when it’s created. Hmmm, maybe that’s why I can’t remember a time when I couldn’t read.
As opposed to regular humans, who have an easy time getting replacement parts and never suddenly die for reasons out of their control.
Humans are mostly self repairing, and at least it isn’t legal to offhandedly kill them.
The author Charles Sheffield had a name for that sort of cyborg (one of his characters was a computer installed in a human skull in place of an organic brain); “embodied computer”.
It would explain some things. Like why I’m freakishly fast and strong, smarter than anyone I know, and don’t seem to age like a normal human.
What? Like a Voight-Kampff exam?
But not entirely self-repairing. A lot of us would like to trade in for a new back by age 40 or so, for example. A cyborg might be able to do that. A human can’t. Back surgery on humans doesn’t have a very high success rate, either.
Humans can die at random at pretty much any time, or can die from doing something stupid. That’s not that different from someone being able to throw a kill switch, really.
It’s adding one more thing to the list of things you can’t do without a good chance of dying. There are a number of things on that list for everybody, like pulling a running hair dryer into the bathtub with you. Some people have health conditions that give them some extra ones. There are people on medications such that “not taking your medication regularly” goes on that list. For people with peanut allergies, “eating peanuts” is on that list.
In the cyborg’s case, it’s something they could say, rather than something they would do, that would cause death. But that’s not unique to cyborgs. People do get killed for things they say.
It may not be legal to offhandedly kill humans, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. What happens to your killer after you die probably isn’t going to make much difference to you. You’ll still be just as dead whether they get punished or get a bonus from DARPA.
But more so than a machine. How many machines do you know of that can last as long as a human can with no maintenance?
There’s a light bulb in Livermore, CA that’s at 110 years and still going. Very few humans will reach that age.
Mr. Neville saw a very old, but still running, steam engine in a museum in Liverpool, which I can’t find online. This museum has a number of antique steam engines. There are violins made by Stradivarius in the early 1700s that are still being used now.
Humans don’t always do so well without regular maintenance, either. If that weren’t the case, life expectancies wouldn’t have gone up so much with the advent of modern medicine.
This. And I’d want to know whether, in the 65 years since they created me, they have learned how to correct the mistakes they made. Have they learned how to regulate my weight better, or how to avoid diabetes? And what’s with the chronic depression?
And of course, did they create me gay, or did that happen later?
And if they created my family too . . . why did they give me a father who never should have gotten married, and never should have had kids?
But all in all, aside from these questions, life would proceed as usual. I don’t think it would make much difference in my day-to-day life.
I’d like to think I’d handle this in stride, but I fear it would inflame my existing neuroses about difficulty fitting to the point of a serious impediment. Constant fear that I could get “found out” and terminated wouldn’t help.
See post #26, points 4 and 5. It’s all we can assume.
I like that.
An “embodied computer” would have amazing complexity. This experiment is letting the meat aspects work as evolution designed them to work, including disease, an immune system, age, organ failure and death (or tissue necrosis? Zombie AIs!). If this experiment had the technology to get around this, perhaps they would have employed it. But their focus is on an AI, operating in a human vessel, thinking it is a human.
Oh… the military applications of such a machine are endless.
Frankly, I’d be surprised.
Joe