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Episode 138.5

Wah Wonder About Teleportation

( Week 1 of May 2018 )

Greg chats to Kevin Lowe and Dr Greg Watson about the ethics of teleportation.

Notes:

Comments

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ljj101 (legacy)

Smartzi 5 years ago

Given the premise that the teleported version is exactly the same as the source version and that at any time there is only one instance, for practical purposes the identity is transferred. For example ... You are my friend. I saw you a month ago then you went on a 2 week teleported holiday to Antarctica. When you get back we meet for coffee. You are still my friend and it's great to see you again.

Where it gets more contentious is that because information can be stored and copied, any process that requires a person to be converted to pure information potentially creates the ability to duplicate or archive that person. This creates some interesting situations.

If two instances are accidentally created in the teleportation process we can probably come to a reasonable (or random) approach to sharing the original's life. But what if the teleporter is rebooted and replays a previous job so duplicates are created a week or a year apart?

Teleportation as described opens the door to some interesting tangential applications that take advantage of the possibilities that converting a person to information combined with long term storage would allow: interstellar space flight; temporal skipping (eg live one year each century then go back into storage); waiting for cures to currently terminal illnesses, building an army then digitising and storing them until needed for combat; ...

It also gives the ability to create clones which is much more ethically fraught.

Having said all that, if it becomes possible I'm sure it will be popular and we'll work out what's acceptable. Though there will undoubtedly be a few few people singing the Hitchhiker's song "I’ll gladly take the high road or even take the low; But if you have to take me apart to get me there; Then I for one won’t go"

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Aztekk (legacy)

Smartzi 5 years ago

Honestly, as long as the teleported you can remember going into the teleporter and coming out, itd be functionally the same as entanglement based teleportation. Im technically not the same person that I was yesterday, I know I went to sleep last night, and although I wasnt conscious to perceive any change in my reality, Im certain that I'm a different person, yet the same. Im just an 8,000 day old copy of my 4 year old self trying make sense of the experiences I remember.

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Allen Rowbotham (legacy)

Smartzi 5 years ago

My thought is, if the transmission is instantaneous then you would be the same however, if time passes during the transmission then you cannot be the same. i.e. let us say that, while you were being transmitted the president was assassinated, my view is that you would not know about the killing and therefore would not be the same as the original body which was transmitted.

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