A world of competing human emulations is a world I would actually want to live in
I think there’s a huge danger of people running private servers full of emulations and doing anything they want to them, undetectably. Desire for power over others is a very real thing, in some people at least. Maybe the government could prevent it by oversight; but in modern democracy a big factor of stability is that people could rise up and feasibly overthrow the government. Emulations on private servers wouldn’t have that power, so I don’t expect government to stably defend their rights. It’ll wash out over time, to agree more with the interests of those who can actually influence government. In short, this leads to emulation-world being very bad and I don’t want it.
The same arguments would apply to our world if governments got armies of autonomous drones, for example. Whenever I imagine possible worlds, the distribution of power is the first thing I think about. It makes the problem more real: it’s very hard to imagine a nice future world that works.
I don’t necessarily disagree that these guesses are plausible, but I don’t think it’s possible to predict exactly what emulation world ends up looking like, and even your high level description of the dynamics looks very likely to be wrong.
The goal is to become one of the early emulations and shape the culture, regulations, technology etc. into a positive and stable form—or at least, into carefully chosen initial conditions.
My argument goes something like this: 1) throughout history, big differences in power have been a recipe for abuse; 2) uploading allows bigger power differences than ever existed before. It’s a big concern to me and I’m not sure we can “wing it”, it’s better to have a plan now.
I don’t find this sketch of an argument very convincing. Like, yes I agree we should have a plan, but by default if it looks like uploading is becoming practical a massive amount of intellectual labor will go into constructing a plan, and even now I can see various reasonable plans. Basically I feel like this is an isolated demand for rigor.
I think there’s a huge danger of people running private servers full of emulations and doing anything they want to them, undetectably. Desire for power over others is a very real thing, in some people at least. Maybe the government could prevent it by oversight; but in modern democracy a big factor of stability is that people could rise up and feasibly overthrow the government. Emulations on private servers wouldn’t have that power, so I don’t expect government to stably defend their rights. It’ll wash out over time, to agree more with the interests of those who can actually influence government. In short, this leads to emulation-world being very bad and I don’t want it.
The same arguments would apply to our world if governments got armies of autonomous drones, for example. Whenever I imagine possible worlds, the distribution of power is the first thing I think about. It makes the problem more real: it’s very hard to imagine a nice future world that works.
I don’t necessarily disagree that these guesses are plausible, but I don’t think it’s possible to predict exactly what emulation world ends up looking like, and even your high level description of the dynamics looks very likely to be wrong.
The goal is to become one of the early emulations and shape the culture, regulations, technology etc. into a positive and stable form—or at least, into carefully chosen initial conditions.
My argument goes something like this: 1) throughout history, big differences in power have been a recipe for abuse; 2) uploading allows bigger power differences than ever existed before. It’s a big concern to me and I’m not sure we can “wing it”, it’s better to have a plan now.
I don’t find this sketch of an argument very convincing. Like, yes I agree we should have a plan, but by default if it looks like uploading is becoming practical a massive amount of intellectual labor will go into constructing a plan, and even now I can see various reasonable plans. Basically I feel like this is an isolated demand for rigor.