There would be some number of digital people that could run simultaneously on whatever people-emulating hardware they have.
I expect this number to become unimaginably high in the foreseeable future, to the point that it is doubtful we’ll be able to generate enough novel cognitive structures to make optimal use of it. The tradeoff would be more like ‘bringing back dead people’ v. ‘running more parallel copies of current people.’ I’d also caution against treating future society as a monolithic Entity with Values that makes Decisions—it’s very probably still going to be capitalist. I expect the deciding factor regarding whether or not cryopatients are revived to be whether or not Alcor can pay for the revival while remaining solvent.
Also, I’m not at all certain about your value calculation there. Creating new people is much less valuable than preserving old ones. It would be wrong to round up and exterminate a billion people in order to ensure than one billion and one babies are born.
It would be wrong to round up and exterminate a billion people in order to ensure than one billion and one babies are born.
I agree, but I don’t think that cuts to the point. The process of rounding up and killing a billion people, the sadness of people left behind, the skill loss, and the change of the age distribution, would all have large negative effects, and a billion and one babies would be a heck of a baby boom.
While practical issues mean that killing people is just about never the right thing to do, I don’t agree that “creating new people is much less valuable than preserving old ones”. See my response to Nisan.
I would not kill a million humans to arrange for one billion babies to be born, even disregarding the practical considerations you mentioned, and, I suspect, neither would most other people. This perspective more or less requires anyone in a position of power to oppose birth control availability, and require mandatory breeding.
I would be about as happy with a human population of one billion as a hundred billion, not counting the number of people who’d have to die to get us down to a billion. I do not have strong preferences over the number of humans. The same does not go for the survival of the living.
I would not kill a million humans to arrange for one billion babies to be born, even disregarding the practical considerations you mentioned, and, I suspect, neither would most other people.
It’s extremely hard to get away from practical considerations here, and it tends to be hard for people to generalize ethics to things as far removed from practicality as killing a million adults to replace them with a billion babies.
This perspective more or less requires anyone in a position of power to oppose birth control availability, and require mandatory breeding.
It would? While mandatory breeding (via birth control denial or other measures) would make for a lot of people, their lives would be much worse. The reason a person in power opposing birth control and mandating breeding sounds horrible is the same as why I would oppose it: it would suck. No one wants to be forced to have kids.
I also care much more about the total number of people to ever exist (again, weighted by how good their lives are) than the total number to exist at once. Dramatically increasing the number of people alive now, even if you did it in a way that didn’t affect average happiness, would probably just make us burn through our current stock of resources faster and not lead to more long-term total people.
I would be about as happy with a human population of one billion as a hundred billion
Now this sounds deeply insane.
(Not as an insult! It just seems horribly scale insensitive.)
I expect this number to become unimaginably high in the foreseeable future, to the point that it is doubtful we’ll be able to generate enough novel cognitive structures to make optimal use of it. The tradeoff would be more like ‘bringing back dead people’ v. ‘running more parallel copies of current people.’ I’d also caution against treating future society as a monolithic Entity with Values that makes Decisions—it’s very probably still going to be capitalist. I expect the deciding factor regarding whether or not cryopatients are revived to be whether or not Alcor can pay for the revival while remaining solvent.
Also, I’m not at all certain about your value calculation there. Creating new people is much less valuable than preserving old ones. It would be wrong to round up and exterminate a billion people in order to ensure than one billion and one babies are born.
I agree, but I don’t think that cuts to the point. The process of rounding up and killing a billion people, the sadness of people left behind, the skill loss, and the change of the age distribution, would all have large negative effects, and a billion and one babies would be a heck of a baby boom.
While practical issues mean that killing people is just about never the right thing to do, I don’t agree that “creating new people is much less valuable than preserving old ones”. See my response to Nisan.
This perspective looks deeply insane to me.
I would not kill a million humans to arrange for one billion babies to be born, even disregarding the practical considerations you mentioned, and, I suspect, neither would most other people. This perspective more or less requires anyone in a position of power to oppose birth control availability, and require mandatory breeding.
I would be about as happy with a human population of one billion as a hundred billion, not counting the number of people who’d have to die to get us down to a billion. I do not have strong preferences over the number of humans. The same does not go for the survival of the living.
It’s extremely hard to get away from practical considerations here, and it tends to be hard for people to generalize ethics to things as far removed from practicality as killing a million adults to replace them with a billion babies.
It would? While mandatory breeding (via birth control denial or other measures) would make for a lot of people, their lives would be much worse. The reason a person in power opposing birth control and mandating breeding sounds horrible is the same as why I would oppose it: it would suck. No one wants to be forced to have kids.
I also care much more about the total number of people to ever exist (again, weighted by how good their lives are) than the total number to exist at once. Dramatically increasing the number of people alive now, even if you did it in a way that didn’t affect average happiness, would probably just make us burn through our current stock of resources faster and not lead to more long-term total people.
Now this sounds deeply insane.
(Not as an insult! It just seems horribly scale insensitive.)