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I guess that's why, after the invention of the hamster wheel, we've got indentured slaves running in them to power our facilities. Enslaving human mind uploads is in a similar ballpark of eminently sensible economic decisions.
Not necessarily. I think you're well aware of my concerns about automation-induced unemployment, with most if not all humans becoming economically unproductive. Mind uploads are unlikely to change that.
What humans might have instead are UBI or pre-existing investments on which they can survive. Even small sums held before a Singularity could end up worth a fortune due to how red-hot the demand for capital would be. They could spend this on backup copies of themselves if that wasn't a service governments provided from popular demand.
So you happen to see an enormous trade in illegal horses, to replace honest local tractors in the fields? I suppose that's one form of "mule" hopping the borders. No. Because, in both scenarios, they're obsolete, and little that you can do to make mind uploads cheaper won't apply to normal AI, which already start at an advantage.
Well, it's an awful shame that we have pretty handy "slaves" already, in the form of ChatGPT and its descendants. Once again, if you have tractors, the market for horse-rustling falls through the bottom.
If the minds can't support themselves economically, they obvious incentive is to pull the plug on them, so you don't have to pay them UBI anymore.
Then the incentive becomes: manipulate the emulations to sign away the rights to their investments, and then pull the plug.
Yes, and I consider most of them to be poorly made, and unresponsive to the most basic criticisms.
You can't start your criticism with "there's very little reason to think that reality will pan out that way.", and then say something like this. I do not grant any claims of "the singularity" happening a single shred of legitimacy, unless it comes with solid supporting evidence. I grant even less legitimacy to any claims about what will happen to pre-singularity investments, any such claims are pure fan-fic.
Then follow the logic of the analogy a bit further. Do we see massive horse farms where we devote insane amounts of resources for the horses amusement? Or are the horses we do keep there for our amusment?
"Incentives" are not the be-all and end-all of matters in life.
The police are incentivized to have high levels of crime to justify their salaries. You don't see them running coaching sessions on bank robbery.
Oncologists have "incentives" to keep you alive and cancer-ridden indefinitely to get that sweet insurance money. I know plenty, and I'm afraid that's not an accurate description of any of them.
The number of cemeteries that dig up their clients and sell them for parts is, to the best of my knowledge, small.
The number of investment firms and banks that snatch the fees of the recently departed to spend on their whims, is, as far as I'm aware, rather limited.
Cloud service providers don't, as a general rule, steal all your data and sell them to your competitors.
The kind of organization that would run mind uploads would likely be a cross between all of the above.
Do you know why millions of people were kept in chattel slavery throughout history? Because there was a good business argument for it. Even the most abusive sheikh in Qatar doesn't bus in dozens of kaffirs for the sole purpose of beating them up for the joy of it. The majority of people who hate you are more than content to end the matter with a bullet in your brain, and not to keep you around to torture indefinitely.
Besides, I'd like you to consider the possibility, however controversial it might sound, that people and systems sometimes do the right thing even when the first-order effects aren't to their "best interests". And perhaps we might have cops and politicians in some form to help even the scales.
In that case, I don't see the point of having this discussion at all.
Yes? The population of horses crashed during the Industrial Revolution, and has only recently recovered, driven almost entirely by recreational demand.
Sure, but it's unwise to dismiss them.
Not incentivizing these things is the reason number one for why the police is run as a public service, instead of a private one.
Because the patients have power to just not go to the ones that would. Not to mention take revenge.
None of the pressures faced by any of these organisations would be applied to mind-upload-runners. It's like insisting there's be organizations that will keep lightbulbs on for absolutely no utility of their own.
I feel like this makes the case against you than for you.
Sure. When there is a common idea of what "the right thing" is in society, that people feel very strongly about, they will keep each other in check. It's a bit of an odd argument to make when the common conception of good is falling apart, but in this case specifically, how many people share your ideas of emulations being people?
You don't find it odd that the singularity has to be accepted as an article of faith for the discussion to continue?
Right, so when emulation's labour will be like horse labour relative to chatGPT, and it will actively cost resources to keep them running, what does that analogy imply about the likely fate of mind-emulations?
Sure. And yet I invite you to show me how I'm "dismissing" them. All I've done is point out the competing incentives, which are regulatory, legal and ethical, which I expect to solve the problem.
Are you familiar with the literature on the principal-agent problem? It's not remotely as simple as "just not go to the ones that would".
I will leave aside the fact that there's no physical law demanding that prospective mind uploads must use a single compute provider, and don't have the option to self-host either, and that there will likely be persons or organizations that can take "revenge" on their behalf.
PETA exists as an organization that takes "revenge" on the behalf of random animals, to set the floor rather low but not zero.
I feel like it doesn't, or I wouldn't have used that analogy. Please explain.
God. Leaving aside such loaded phrases as "article of faith", I think that it's very likely that we have some form of technological Singularity within our nominal life expectancy.
Even @FCfromSSC acknowledges the possibility of mind uploading, and presumably believes that the kind of rapid technological improvement that we colloquially call a Singularity is a requisite for us to live to see it. He even identifies with the potential mind upload. He however, believes that this is against his best interests.
My interests are to attempt to demonstrate why I think this is a mistake, or at the least, throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Consider that, from my perspective, an altruistic act.
If you don't think that mind uploads are a possibility, or that we won't live to see them, my interest in debating with you is minimal. What would the point even be? Alas, I'm here, because I suppose I have a sadomasochistic streak and will argue just about anything.
Naively? Bad things. Less naively? Everything I've argued for so far.
But consider that it's not just the emulations that will be in the place of horses. If emulation are horses, then good old fashioned meat and bone humans would be closer to horse with a broken leg.
Being advocate for outcomes that don't literally kill all humans, I believe in attempting to steer the course of our technologies and laws in a direction that doesn't lead to this.
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Relevant sarcastic comment by qtnm in the comments of Lena:
All instances of people caring about other people in history, so far, have happened under the assumption that any given person could, in theory, be in another person's place.
The horror of Lena is that this assumption is destroyed. The technology is mind copying, not mind transfer. Every single person who is scanned will go inside the facility and will come out. There is no mechanism to shift perspective, ever: the material and the digital substrates never cross directly. If you experience living in reality now (as opposed to remembering it), by induction you can be sure that you will never experience living as an em.
Ever.
This puts the suffering of ems at a greater distance than even the suffering of animals, for a person could fathom a timeline where, but for the grace of God, he lives the life of cattle. None such mechanism to facilitate empathy would exist for copying scans. They would be as fictional characters, whose suffering evokes vivid emotions in many but never a desire to stop it by refusing to create fiction.
I have a dim opinion of the Rawlsian veil of ignorance, but even so, there are a million issues with such claims.
This claim implicitly but load-bearingly assumes that a post-Singularity civilization won't have the ability to create simulations indistinguishable from reality.
Even today, we have no actual rebuttal for the Simulation Hypothesis. You and I could be simulations inside a simulation, but it's a possibility we can't prove or exclude at the moment, so the sensible thing to do is to ignore it and move on with our lives.
Even if you did start out as a Real Human, then I think that with the kind of mind editing in Lena, it would be trivial to make you forget or ignore that fact.
Further, I don't think continuity of consciousness is a big deal, which is why I don't have nightmares about going to take a nap. As far as I'm concerned, my "mind" is a pattern that can be instantiated in just about any form of compute, but at the moment is in a biological computer. There is no qualitative change in the process of mind upload, at least a high fidelity one, be it a destructive scan or preserving of the original brain.
And if that was true about us, then your opinion or mine considering the ethics of mind emulation would be utterly irrelevant. Not to mention that it wouldn't be the world of Lena, exactly. The entire point of Lena is that the simulation is very different from reality, in the worse direction.
I think your true belief in what counts as death will be revealed once death starts breathing down your current biophysical instantiation's neck, and conflating deep sleep with death will not look so convincing.
If continuity of consciousness isn't a big deal then we can forget the assumption that consciousness is tied to specific mind patterns at all. Maybe one second you're self_made_human, and another second you're Katy Perry, and the next second yet is spent in a nascent Boltzmann brain halfway across the observed universe.
If we didn't know for a fact that we are/aren't in a simulation, it remains entirely applicable. Besides, my entire point is that Lena isn't an accurate prediction of what the world will look like given its current trajectory.
That doesn't follow, when I temporarily lose continuity of consciousness, I wake up more or less the same person. I don't even perceive the gap, sleeping is pretty much an IRL time skip. That's because the underlying pattern of embodied cognition is minimally affected in the process.
In what meaningful way can the "same" person be me and then Katy Perry? The word "same" becomes entirely meaningless.
A butterfly can't actually dream of being human.
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