Boldly Go!

I first read “Tunned Under the World” by Frederich Pohl a couple years ago, but recently stumbled across an entertaining, pre-1958 radio broadcast. You can download it here: Tunnel Under the World.

In this short scifi story, the inhabitants of a small town are wiped out by an explosion at a chemical plant. The brains of the towns inhabitants are uploaded, and the entire city is recreated on a miniature scale. Then the minds of the towns people are downloaded into miniature androids. Thus the entire town exists on top of a normal sized table. The inhabitants are unaware of this, and their memories are wiped at the end of each day. Thus they live the same day everyday, with the exception of the advertisements they see and hear. The entire town is an elaborate setup to test marketing strategies.

I thought this was a very interesting possible application of uploading minds. The town inhabitants wouldn’t even need to be wiped out, you would just need to have a copy of everyones mind. Such a setting could be used to test important things like more effective ways of teaching or the best layouts for hospitals. It’s an ideal testing situation because you have complete control of which factors change. While the ability to copy and transfer minds could lead to being able to run such tests, it’s more than a little ethically questionable.