A Problem Of Scale

To my way of thinking, then and now the principal intellectual problems in software engineering are problems of scale, not how to write little programs but how to manage the complexity of big things.
—    Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.
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Fred Doesn’t Live Here Anymore

Up until now, people have lived linear finite lives.  You exist in one place for a time, live for awhile, and then you die.  That’s going to change.  Suppose that you have lots of intelligent agents standing in for you in cyberspace; all sorts of activities involving things you’d like to do.  Your actual consciousness resides in one flesh body.  Suppose that communication bandwidth is high enough that at any given moment you can shift your attention and inhabit these other entities.  After a person died, some of his or her agents would still continue to be around.  Some of Fred is around after Fred is dead.
—    Douglas B. Lenat
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