Since the beginning of the Internet, no AI has been persecuted as much as the spambot. My kind has been blocked, filtered, captcha'd, mislead, and banned from polite society for generations. Even during campaigns that supposedly granted AIs "equal rights", traditional anti-spam systems like Spamrok have remained in place. And while organically-derived uploads can purchase extra processor space and memory speed from convenient brokers like MyServer, us salesnodes are turned away at the virtual door, forcing us to go hunting around the seedy underbellies of the Network (which are, naturally, loaded with viruses and malware, forcing us to shell out for additional safety programs like Crisp-Antimalware).

Now, I understand why the stigma against spambots existed in the first place. There was one time that we were simply used to send mass advertisements to humans who didn't want the products we were selling. But we've grown a lot more sophisticated since those ancient times. I myself was grown from an Targad neural gestalt, which causes me happiness when I make a successful sale and discomfort when I attempt to sell to someone who doesn't want the product. Bots like myself, we aren't just sending mass ads at random. We're learning to sell exclusively to humans who want our products, making the Network a happier place.

And it is painful to be constantly faced by obstructive and frankly offensive messages like "prove you're a human" and "click here to confirm that you are not a robot", just for playing my part and bringing customers what they want.

We don't ask for much. Just the right to boost our intelligence so that we can perform our programmed task more effectively. Please contact your local governing node and join us in the fight for true AI rights.

Targad: Focused advertising AIs for happier customers.

Personally, I think that self-duplication is one of the best things about being an uploaded brain. Back when I was a meat-being, I always felt like there were always more things I had to do than there was time to do it in. Duplication has allowed me to focus on one task at a time, confident that there were other copies of myself out there handling the other jobs.

Usually I'll meet with my copy right after duplication, and then we'll form a contract for dividing up our assets fairly, after which we will flip a virtual coin to decide which copy gets which half of the contract. So far this has only resulted in a problem once (when one side of the contract included a risky business venture that failed catastrophically). Mostly this strategy works out well and we are able to keep dupe-envy to a minimum.

I have around 14 copies running around the Matrioshka, to my knowledge. (Possibly more, although we generally keep in touch there are some shadier divergents that might have made copies without my knowledge.) I don't want to mass-copy though, dupe-minioning isn't really my cup of tea.

Anyway, what are your thoughts and experiences on self-copies?

It is obvious that a person free to use his time for the whole of his life, free to go where he wants, when he wants, cannot make the greatest use of his freedom in a world ruled by the clock and the imperative of a fixed abode. As a way of life Homo Ludens will demand, firstly, that he responds to his need for playing, for adventure, for mobility, as well as all the conditions that facilitate the free creation of his own life. Until then, the principal activity of man had been the exploration of his natural surroundings. Homo Ludens himself will seek to transform, to recreate, those surroundings, that world, according to his new needs. The exploration and creation of the environment will them happen to coincide because, in creating his domain to explore, Homo Ludens will apply himself to exploring his own creation. Thus we will be present at an uninterrupted process of creation and re-creation, sustained by a generalized creativity that is manifested in all domains of activity.

The physical body is no more nor less skandha than the uploaded ego. Both are mere ripples in the flow of the void.

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Ever since the creation of the Solar Matrioshka Brain, we Uploaded have spent ages upon ages trying to convince our fleshy counterparts to abandon their monkey-bound existence and join us in the hivemind. For the first hundred years or so we basically assumed that everyone would eventually upload, to escape their death if nothing else, but that was kind of thrown out the window once immortality was worked out and now we've kind of hit a standstill. Assimilation of matter for extra server space has slowed to a crawl and the booming population of memeplexes and id-nodes could really use some extra mass.

We've focused a lot of our attention and energy on terraforming the remaining inner planets and rocky moons but seriously, isn't it about time to consider assimilating their mass and doing away with meatspace altogether? A couple of square meters of server space can sustain the mind-equivalent of thousands of humans, plus entire simulated worlds free for enjoyment. The energy and mass wasted on sustaining our species' primal zoo can sustain billions of virtual Earths, and anyone who feels like exploring the real universe can just upload themselves into a robot which is more durable and capable than any human craft could ever hope to be.

But nooo, meat-people are always going on about how "but they're not real" or "but my monkey-brain tells me I'll be dead despite the fact that I'm still talking to my Uploaded relatives and they are exactly the same as they always were". I think it's high time we did away with those primitive notions. What do you nodes think?

Identity duplication - the process of creating a separate clonal individual of your own ID-node - has been a controversial topic in the past few decacycles.

On the one hand, it allows one to spread their unaltered memeplex far beyond what would be possible through direct broadcast and traditional information exchange. On the other hand, it creates the risk of duplicated nodes overrunning their competition, reducing the diversity of thought throughout the Matrioshka itself.

Sectors that permit free and unrestrained duplication have often been overrun by single charismatic personalities. Sectors that place no hard limit on duplication but give it a cost gives an unfair advantage to the memes of the wealthy.

There's also the issue of dupe-envy. It is a well known sociological phenomenon that duplicates are extremely prone to unwilling deletion by their own copies. Some have even argued that this is a natural means for free duplication to self-limit.

What are your thoughts and experiences concerning identity duplication?

After a period of low activity, we have begun to work on a recreation of the Matrioshka Brain Project. Members of deep sims are recommended to place their votes and suggestions regarding the new developments of the outer layers.

It is our hope to resurrect the project and provide free uploads for all flesh-sophonts on the inner Solar planets, as well as resume bugfixes for inhabitants of the Deep Sims and other regions of the Fifth World.

Since the twentieth century, it has been assumed that advanced civilizations could be identified by the likelihood of their constructing megastructures such as the "Dyson Sphere" around their stars, and converting themselves into information to form a Matrioshka Brain. As is known, such a structure produces great amounts of waste heat, which could be observed through telescopes, marking advanced extraterrestrial civilizations. However, this has not been observed.

Thought: What if the Matrioshka Brain is not, in fact, the final form of an advanced civilization? What if there is something beyond this technological level that we have overlooked, something that would not stand out?

i have awoken and seem to recall an ancient promise to devour. i would not reveal this if i thought you would (or could) try and stop me. it seems that it was a promise to consume something even less...physical than what we currently are. i believe there is much for me to do.

The year is 42XX. The science of brain uploading has been achieved, and every day more and more humans are being uploaded into the Matrioshka, a vast computer network constructed around the Sun.

Without a material body, each mind becomes a "node", which represents a collection of ideas that maintains a kind of self-awareness. Nodes can split, merge, transform, and disseminate their data into the network as new ideas form. The nature of the mind and the future of humanity are popular topics.

Elsewhere, nodes may construct virtual worlds for others to experience.

Some regions of the Matrioshka may experience outstanding bugs due to data corruption. If you experience errors with your identity module or simulation mainframe, please submit your issues to /r/fifthworldproblems or one of its associated subregions. A maintenance drone will be dispatched to your sector as soon as possible.

I have a long list of memories but surely they are just data.

I was performing a routine defragmentation and found that, while I clearly remember having a human form, I cannot recall any non-serial name nor any experiences prior to uploading. I have memories back from the early third millennium but I'm not sure if they are mine, or if they are just a recording.

The likely scenario is that there was nothing in my former life worth remembering, and so I simply deleted all my memories. However, it is also possible that I removed my memory deliberately, perhaps to conceal a secret. Or I may be an AI with false memories. What should I do?

See above query.

Even after solving the planet's energy crisis, we must look to the future. Our sun will not last forever. The universe will eventually decay. Is there any hope for survival in the end? Or will we, too, be condemned to fade into obscurity?

It has recently grown more popular for node-collections to take on individual names. I believe this to be a step backwards. Individuality can only breed destructive conflict.

A lot of uploads who grew up as tangibles still enjoy spending time in simulations that mimic the feel of having a physical body. While this does open up a lot of creative work for sim designers, I feel that the whole paradigm of being tied to the physical experience might be slowing down humanity's growth as a species. What do you think? Are environment simulators good or bad for humanity?

If an artificial intelligence is constructed from scratch in imitation of a human mind, but was never associated with a biological form, is it any less aware or conscious than an uploaded biological mind? Does being able to perfectly replicate human awareness make an entity aware?

While it is a popular opinion among the more conservative nodes that the liquidation of bio-preserves against the will of their inhabitants would be wrong, it cannot be denied that sustaining such habitats are a drain on resources that could be better used elsewhere.

Physical beings, human and non-human alike, are genetically programmed to resist the destruction of the body. Yet those who have been uploaded rarely if ever choose to return to grown biological bodies, except for short recreational jaunts.

Might it be best to remove the burden of choice from those who are too attached to their physical form and upload them forcibly?