The methods outlined above to enhance productivity could also be used to produce emulations
with trusted motivations. A saved version of an emulation would have particular motives,
loyalties, and dispositions which would be initially shared by any copies made from it. Such
copies could be subjected to exhaustive psychological testing, staged situations, and direct
observation of their emulation software to form clear pictures of their loyalties. Ordinarily, one
might fear that copies of emulations would subsequently change their values in response to
differing experiences (Hanson and Hughes, 2007). But members of a superorganism could
consent to deletion after a limited time to preempt any such value divergence. Any number of
copies with stable identical motivations could thus be produced, and could coordinate to solve
collective action problems even in the absence of overarching legal constraints.
Carl Shulman wrote about resetting uploads to prevent value change in his Whole Brain Emulation and the Evolution of Superorganisms (which I previously posted under discussion):
No new ideas under the sun… :-)