Categories
Science Fiction and Fantasy

Forget to save the world

Memory editing! It’s around the corner! the NYT says so! (haven’t read it, but it seems to be the primary source cited by this Wired story, where Anders Sandberg discusses the ramifications).

But, throw in this, and the Science Fiction story writes itself. Heck, the Science Fiction story is redundant:

To understand how the many-worlds scenario could allow a future disaster to be avoided, says Mitra, consider a hypothetical machine intelligence that regularly backs up its memory. If it encountered a glitch, for example, it could reset its memory to, say, the previous day’s state.

Imagine that on learning of an impending disaster – perhaps a catastrophic asteroid strike on its planet – the machine resets its memory. Now, an observer sat next to the machine can verify that the “same machine” will still face disaster after the reset. But from the perspective of the machine’s reset memory, the state of the universe in the many-worlds scenario becomes “undetermined”.