I think the problem with WBE is that anyone who owns a computer and can decently hide it (or fly off in a spaceship with it) becomes able to own slaves, torture them and whatnot. So after that technology appears, we need some very strong oversight—it becomes almost mandatory to have a friendly AI watching over everything.
I’m considering a world transitioning to being run by WBE rather than AI so I would prefer not to give everyone “slap drones” https://theculture.fandom.com/wiki/Slap-drone To start with the compute will mean few WBE, much less than humans and they will police each other. Later on, I am too much of a moral realist to imagine that there would be mass senseless torturing. For a start if you well protect other em’s so you can only simulate yourself, you wouldn’t do it. I expect any boring job can be made non-conscious so their just isn’t the incentive to do that. At the late stage singularity if you will let humanity go their own way, there is fundamentally a tradeoff between letting “people”(WBE etc) make their own decisions and allowing the possibility of them doing bad things. You also have to be strongly suffering averse vs util - there would surely be >>> more “heavens” vs “hells” if you just let advanced beings do their own thing.
I think the problem with WBE is that anyone who owns a computer and can decently hide it (or fly off in a spaceship with it) becomes able to own slaves, torture them and whatnot. So after that technology appears, we need some very strong oversight—it becomes almost mandatory to have a friendly AI watching over everything.
I’m considering a world transitioning to being run by WBE rather than AI so I would prefer not to give everyone “slap drones” https://theculture.fandom.com/wiki/Slap-drone To start with the compute will mean few WBE, much less than humans and they will police each other. Later on, I am too much of a moral realist to imagine that there would be mass senseless torturing. For a start if you well protect other em’s so you can only simulate yourself, you wouldn’t do it. I expect any boring job can be made non-conscious so their just isn’t the incentive to do that. At the late stage singularity if you will let humanity go their own way, there is fundamentally a tradeoff between letting “people”(WBE etc) make their own decisions and allowing the possibility of them doing bad things. You also have to be strongly suffering averse vs util - there would surely be >>> more “heavens” vs “hells” if you just let advanced beings do their own thing.