I don’t believe emulations should be given voting rights unless there is very careful regulation on how they are created; otherwise manufacturers would have perverse incentives.
Do you in general support regulations on creating things with voting rights, to avoid manufacturers having perverse incentives?
Assuming you’re aiming to refer to creating humans:
It seems to me that there’s a qualitative difference between current methods of creating voters (i.e. childbearing) and creating a whole ton of emulations. Our current methods are distributed, slow, have a long time gap (so time discounting applies to incentives), and there are better options for abuse of authority than breeding new voters. Whereas effectively free creation of human-equivalent ems is fast, centralized, has effectively no time gap, and could easily warp the political context, assuming “political context” still matters in such a world.
But I think even thinking about voting rights for ems is solving the wrong problem. If we as a society determine that ems ought to have the rights and privileges of citizens, but doing so completely breaks democracy as we know it, it is likely that the proper response is not to rearrange voting rights, but to simply replace democracy with Something Else that better fits the new situation.
Democracy isn’t immutable. If it doesn’t work, find something else that does.
Considering your question, I have changed my position. In its current form it applies equally well to both ems and humans. Also, note that careful regulation does not necessarily mean heavy regulation. In fact, heavy regulation has the danger of creating perverse incentives to the regulators.
There are some people that for religious reasons forego birth control causing bigger families. Am I correct in extrapolating that you would find that a child of such parents would have less basis to have their vote counted in equal force?
The regulation wasn’t supposed to be on creating the things, the regulation was supposed to be on giving them the right to vote once they have been created.
I’d suggest that in a situation where it is possible to, for instance, shove a person into a replicator and instantly get a billion copies with a 1 hour lifespan, we should indeed deny such copies voting rights.
Of course, creating doesn’t necessarily mean creating from scratch. Suppose nonresidents cannot vote, residents can vote, and the residency requirement is one hout. You can create residents from nonresidents by bussing them in and waiting. I would support a regulation that did not allow such newly created residents to vote.
I can’t think of any real-life situations where it’s easy enough to create voters that there are any such perverse incentives (real-life cases of bussing in nonresidents are usually just vote fraud).
Do you in general support regulations on creating things with voting rights, to avoid manufacturers having perverse incentives?
Assuming you’re aiming to refer to creating humans:
It seems to me that there’s a qualitative difference between current methods of creating voters (i.e. childbearing) and creating a whole ton of emulations. Our current methods are distributed, slow, have a long time gap (so time discounting applies to incentives), and there are better options for abuse of authority than breeding new voters. Whereas effectively free creation of human-equivalent ems is fast, centralized, has effectively no time gap, and could easily warp the political context, assuming “political context” still matters in such a world.
But I think even thinking about voting rights for ems is solving the wrong problem. If we as a society determine that ems ought to have the rights and privileges of citizens, but doing so completely breaks democracy as we know it, it is likely that the proper response is not to rearrange voting rights, but to simply replace democracy with Something Else that better fits the new situation.
Democracy isn’t immutable. If it doesn’t work, find something else that does.
Considering your question, I have changed my position. In its current form it applies equally well to both ems and humans. Also, note that careful regulation does not necessarily mean heavy regulation. In fact, heavy regulation has the danger of creating perverse incentives to the regulators.
There are some people that for religious reasons forego birth control causing bigger families. Am I correct in extrapolating that you would find that a child of such parents would have less basis to have their vote counted in equal force?
The regulation wasn’t supposed to be on creating the things, the regulation was supposed to be on giving them the right to vote once they have been created.
I’d suggest that in a situation where it is possible to, for instance, shove a person into a replicator and instantly get a billion copies with a 1 hour lifespan, we should indeed deny such copies voting rights.
Of course, creating doesn’t necessarily mean creating from scratch. Suppose nonresidents cannot vote, residents can vote, and the residency requirement is one hout. You can create residents from nonresidents by bussing them in and waiting. I would support a regulation that did not allow such newly created residents to vote.
I can’t think of any real-life situations where it’s easy enough to create voters that there are any such perverse incentives (real-life cases of bussing in nonresidents are usually just vote fraud).