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Comment by ryandvm | Hacker News Reader

That was really fascinating. It reminds me of a sci-fi book I read with a very similar concept. A guy's brain image becomes the AI that powers a series of space probes. I actually ended up enjoying it way more than I thought I would (yes, the title is silly).

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01LWAESYQ?tag=5984293-20

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For folks looking for a more hard-scifi/serious approach to this, a lot of Greg Egan's works touch on the subject. Permutation City, especially.

My most recent favorite of his is the Bit Players series; the first story is available here, the sequels (which get better and better) are collected in his collection *Instantiation*.

Bit players: https://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/winter_2014/bit_playe...

Instantiation: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50641444-instantiation

Permutation City: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/156784.Permutation_City

I couldn't get into Permutation City. Once they got to the part where they create another Autoverse inside, I was bored to tears, read the Wikipedia summary, and promptly quit reading the book.

That's probably fine - it does take a stark plot-and-theme turn around that mark. I hope it didn't turn you off all of his books!

No, not at all. I remember reading Quarantine when it came out, AMAZING book. This one was interesting until they got in the TVC, then it got boring (IMO) and when I read teh wiki page I realized I stopped caring about it. The concept was interesting, and I liked the idea. I read it last year shortly before the 4th Bobiverse book came out which starts to explore the general concept of "once information exists it can't unexist", hinting at what might come in the 5th book.

Also the Christmas special of Black Mirror. It's about a police interrogation on a brain scan where you have less ethical issues getting in the way (arguably). A few other black mirror episodes touch on the same thing, but not nearly as much as this one.

Probably near my favorite black mirror episode for the sheer amount of dread it's caused me.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3973198/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5058700/

Altered Carbon also heavily featured this idea. Parallelised faster-than-realtime torture, fuzz torture in many ways I guess, with presets to make the subject more compliant to start with.

“We are legion/we are Bob” is a great read I’d recommend to anyone. It was somewhere between what I enjoy about Star Trek and what I enjoy about Douglas Adams.

See also SCP-2669: http://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-2669

Hmm, sounds a lot like localroger's "Passages in the Void"[1] series, in particular " Mortal Passage"[2].

[1]: http://localroger.com/

[2]: http://localroger.com/k5host/mpass.html

The Bobiverse books quickly became some of my favorite. His boot Outland was great too.

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