Perry E. Metzger wrote: > Now, such a creature also has a feature that humans (at least current > ones) don't have, which is that it need not be raised and educated > over a course of decades but can simply be copied. Given a couple of > prototypes, a large group of such beings could be built (or more > likely could build each other) and might make astonishingly rapid > engineering progress in a period that normal people would barely > notice.
I'm not certain copying such an entity will be as trivial as it is with present-day digital data, for, unlike the human brain which is self-contained, an AI will inevitably be a vast web of connections distributed across computing resources. Copying will imply a deep copy of distributed data structures, separating them from existing references. Given these structures are also continuously in use, I dare say it's one hairy operation.
