Umm, stop waving your hands and start putting some estimates down. Especially when you say things like
Over a long enough timeline, the probability of a copy of any given uploaded mind falling into the power of a sadistic jerk approaches unity.
You show an inability to actually figure out the relative frequencies that would make this true or false. There’s lots of ways this could be false—most notably there may be dozens of orders of magnitude more uploaded minds than sadistic jerks, and any nonzero cost of running a mind means the SJs simply can’t afford to torture most of them.
Once an uploaded mind has fallen under the power of a sadistic jerk, there is no guarantee that it will ever be ‘free’, and the quantity of experienced sufferring could be arbitrarily large, due in part to the embarrassingly parallel nature of torture enabled by running multiple copies of a captive mind.
More unstated assumptions (with which I think I disagree). How are you aggregating suffering (or value generally) for minds? Do you think that identical tortures for two copies of a mind is different than torture of one? Why? Do you think that any amount of future potential torture can remove the value of current pleasure? Why?
Even if you try to just quantify “value * experienced-seconds” and simply multiply, it’s going to be hard to think anyone is better off NOT being uploaded.
Feel free to make choices for yourself, and even to advocate others to securely erase their information-patterns before it’s too late. But without a lot more clear probability estimates and aggregation methodology, I think I’ll take my chances and seek to continue living.
For the sake of argument, some numbers to match the assumptions you named. Let’s base these assumptions on some numbers available to Americans today, rounded to even numbers in the direction least favorable to my argument.
Percentage of population that are psychopaths: 1% (two orders of magnitude more non psychopaths than psychopaths exist today)
Probability of being victim of violent crime varies a lot based on demographics, 10 per 1000 per year is reasonable...so 1%
Power consumption of human mind: 20W (based on the human brain, we will not hit this immediately, but it is a design goal, and may even be exceeded in efficiency as we get better)
Power consumed by typical American household: 900kWh per month (100 years in brain-seconds)
Number of humans available for uploading: 10 billion.
Over a hundred thousand years, that’s a lot of terrible people, a lot of spare capacity for evil, and a high probability of everyone eventually experiencing a violent crime, like upload-torment. Changes to those numbers unfavorable to this scenario require incredible optimism about social developments, and pessimism about technical developments.
I feel like just about anyone, even without a stanford prison experiment like environment, can muster up the will to leave a lightbulb on for a while out of spite.
Arguably, once ‘captured’, the aggregate total time spent experiencing torture for a given future copy of you may vastly exceed the time spent on anything else.
Anyone who argues in favor of ‘merciful’ euthanasia for people on the way to horrific medical problems would likely argue in favor of secure deletion to avoid an eternity in hell.
Umm, stop waving your hands and start putting some estimates down. Especially when you say things like
You show an inability to actually figure out the relative frequencies that would make this true or false. There’s lots of ways this could be false—most notably there may be dozens of orders of magnitude more uploaded minds than sadistic jerks, and any nonzero cost of running a mind means the SJs simply can’t afford to torture most of them.
More unstated assumptions (with which I think I disagree). How are you aggregating suffering (or value generally) for minds? Do you think that identical tortures for two copies of a mind is different than torture of one? Why? Do you think that any amount of future potential torture can remove the value of current pleasure? Why?
Even if you try to just quantify “value * experienced-seconds” and simply multiply, it’s going to be hard to think anyone is better off NOT being uploaded.
Feel free to make choices for yourself, and even to advocate others to securely erase their information-patterns before it’s too late. But without a lot more clear probability estimates and aggregation methodology, I think I’ll take my chances and seek to continue living.
For the sake of argument, some numbers to match the assumptions you named. Let’s base these assumptions on some numbers available to Americans today, rounded to even numbers in the direction least favorable to my argument.
Percentage of population that are psychopaths: 1% (two orders of magnitude more non psychopaths than psychopaths exist today) Probability of being victim of violent crime varies a lot based on demographics, 10 per 1000 per year is reasonable...so 1% Power consumption of human mind: 20W (based on the human brain, we will not hit this immediately, but it is a design goal, and may even be exceeded in efficiency as we get better) Power consumed by typical American household: 900kWh per month (100 years in brain-seconds) Number of humans available for uploading: 10 billion.
Over a hundred thousand years, that’s a lot of terrible people, a lot of spare capacity for evil, and a high probability of everyone eventually experiencing a violent crime, like upload-torment. Changes to those numbers unfavorable to this scenario require incredible optimism about social developments, and pessimism about technical developments.
I feel like just about anyone, even without a stanford prison experiment like environment, can muster up the will to leave a lightbulb on for a while out of spite.
Arguably, once ‘captured’, the aggregate total time spent experiencing torture for a given future copy of you may vastly exceed the time spent on anything else.
Anyone who argues in favor of ‘merciful’ euthanasia for people on the way to horrific medical problems would likely argue in favor of secure deletion to avoid an eternity in hell.