People who are into ems seem to make a lot of assumptions about what ems are like and seem completely unattached to present-day culture or even structure of life, seem willing to spam duplicates of people around, etc. I know that Hanson thinks that 1. ems will not be robbed of their humanity and 2. that lots of things we currently consider horrible will come to pass and be accepted, but it’s rather strange just how as soon as people say ‘em’ (as opposed to any other form of uploading) everything gets weird.
with an answer
Basically it’s a matter of natural selection. Given a starting population of EMs, if some are unwilling to be copied, the ones that are willing to be copied will dominate the population in short order. If EMs are useful for work, eg valuable, then the more valuable ones will be copied more often. At that point, EMs that are willing to be copied and do slave labor effectively for no complaints will become the most copied, and the population of ems will end up being composed largely of copies of the person/people who are 1) ok with being copied, 2) ok with being modified to work more effectively.
Doesn’t make too much sense. Not to mention that those are not questions.
The questions in the post are
What’s with the ems?
Does anthropics come into it?
Why the huge focus on fully paternalistic Friendly AI rather than Obedient AI?
At least to me the answer doesn’t seem to fit any of those but I guess the community highly disagrees with me given the upvotes and downvotes.
Question 1 doesn’t end with the question mark; the next two sentences explain the intention of asking “what’s with the ems?” Which would otherwise be a hopelessly vague question, but becomes clear enough with the help. Charitable interpretation trumps exact punctuation as an interpretive guide.
What question are you answering?
Question 1, especially sentences 2-3. How to tell: the answer is highly appropriate and correct if taken as a response to that.
with an answer
Doesn’t make too much sense. Not to mention that those are not questions.
The questions in the post are
What’s with the ems?
Does anthropics come into it?
Why the huge focus on fully paternalistic Friendly AI rather than Obedient AI?
At least to me the answer doesn’t seem to fit any of those but I guess the community highly disagrees with me given the upvotes and downvotes.
Question 1 doesn’t end with the question mark; the next two sentences explain the intention of asking “what’s with the ems?” Which would otherwise be a hopelessly vague question, but becomes clear enough with the help. Charitable interpretation trumps exact punctuation as an interpretive guide.