What if uploads decide to take over by force, refusing to pay back their loans and grabbing other forms of capital? Well for comparison, consider the question: What if our children take over, refusing to pay back their student loans or to pay for Social Security? Or consider: What if short people revolt tonight, and kill all the tall people?
In general, most societies have many potential subgroups who could plausibly take over by force, if they could coordinate among themselves. But such revolt is rare in practice; short people know that if they kill all the tall folks tonight, all the blond people might go next week, and who knows where it would all end? And short people are highly integrated into society; some of their best friends are tall people.
In contrast, violence is more common between geographic and culturally separated subgroups. Neighboring nations have gone to war, ethnic minorities have revolted against governments run by other ethnicities, and slaves and other sharply segregated economic classes have rebelled.
Thus the best way to keep the peace with uploads would be to allow them as full as possible integration in with the rest of society. Let them live and work with ordinary people, and let them loan and sell to each other through the same institutions they use to deal with ordinary humans. Banning uploads into space, the seas, or the attic so as not to shock other folks might be ill-advised. Imposing especially heavy upload taxes, or treating uploads as property, as just software someone owns or as non-human slaves like dogs, might be especially unwise.
But there is a barrier that is just as vast as any geographical barrier in terms of culture and social contact. Time. Imagine the world was filled with slow and fast people, slower people being just as smart but running at a speed about half that of fast people. Who would you tend to interact with more in your personal life?
Taking his basic Darwinian argument, overall human uploads will run at precisely at the speed at which it is most economical to run them. Which may not be the same depending on their particular profession or personality type. Over time any small initial cultural differences would compound.
Indeed. This is why I have a hard time thinking of ems as “friendly”, even as I concede they would be fully human—we have considerable historical precedent as to what happens when one group of humans is much more powerful than a colocated other group of humans.
Frankly, humans aren’t human-friendly intelligences. As such, it’s not clear to me that “human-friendly intelligence” is even a sufficiently coherent concept to make predictions from; much as “God” isn’t a coherent concept.
Reading some of Robin Hanson’s older writting: If Uploads Come First
But there is a barrier that is just as vast as any geographical barrier in terms of culture and social contact. Time. Imagine the world was filled with slow and fast people, slower people being just as smart but running at a speed about half that of fast people. Who would you tend to interact with more in your personal life?
Taking his basic Darwinian argument, overall human uploads will run at precisely at the speed at which it is most economical to run them. Which may not be the same depending on their particular profession or personality type. Over time any small initial cultural differences would compound.
Indeed. This is why I have a hard time thinking of ems as “friendly”, even as I concede they would be fully human—we have considerable historical precedent as to what happens when one group of humans is much more powerful than a colocated other group of humans.
Frankly, humans aren’t human-friendly intelligences. As such, it’s not clear to me that “human-friendly intelligence” is even a sufficiently coherent concept to make predictions from; much as “God” isn’t a coherent concept.