The original note, as written at the time
Robots enabled with super AI and can hop from body to body. Each robot body contains a storage and processing core that is in itself a communication beacon. Maybe this is the future of AGI.
Ongoing development
Robots enabled with super AI that can hop from body to body. Each body contains a storage and processing core which is itself a communication beacon.
This might be the future of general intelligence, and it is the first proposal I have seen that treats embodiment as disposable rather than decorative.
Everybody else is trying to build one perfect body and then put a mind inside it. The trouble with one body is that it constrains the mind to a place and a chassis and a service life, and the moment the body fails the intelligence is homeless. We have spent enormous effort on the body and comparatively little on the transfer.
Reverse it. The mind lives in the network of cores, one per body, each core small and cheap and interchangeable. The body is a rental. It walks, it lifts, it goes into the rubble, and when it is finished the core that was working through it is already somewhere else, in another body, doing the next thing.
The advantage is not efficiency. It is continuity. A body-hopping system can be present in a hundred places and still be one agent, remembering what it learned in the flooded basement when it is standing in a laboratory. And it can lose bodies without dying, which is the single property that makes a machine safe to send into a place no person should go.
The danger is the obvious one, and it is the same danger as any distributed system: identity. If the core can be copied, then the thing you are talking to is not one thing, and every question about its continuity — who is liable, who agreed, who remembers — becomes unanswerable. So the design has to include something the body cannot carry and the network cannot duplicate.
That is the whole research problem in one line. Not the hopping. The thing that makes hopping safe — a single thread of self that no copy can fork.