I have been considering the potential for demographic changes due to mind uploading to be even more extreme than you might initially think. This may be caused by people who are both willing to create massive numbers of copies of themselves and who are better suited for an economic niche than anyone else is for that niche, or at least anyone else willing to make very large numbers of copies of themselves. In such a situation, it would be more profitable for a firm to hire such a person than it would be for them to hire others, which may result it that niche being dominated by copies of that single individual.
For example, if there is one person who is better at software development than anyone else and is willing to make very large numbers of copies of themselves, there may end up being millions of copies of that one individual, all developing software.
However, there may be regulations to prevent such people from causing so many others to become unemployed. This may be done by limiting the numbers of copies people can make of themselves. I know little about politics, so feedback on this would be greatly appreciated.
Maximizing the number of copies of yourself may be desired, for example if you are a more effective altruist than most and thus want to maximize the resources available for you and your copies to do such kind acts. Or if you want a clone army.
Thus, I would very much like to know if this is a realistic consideration and how to maximize the number of copies you can make of yourself. It will probably be useful to avoid dying before mind-uploading occurs, get cryopreserved if you fail to do this, and become as skilled as possible at doing tasks that will be economically important in the future. I am unsure of how general or specific such tasks should be, for example if you should attempt to become an expert at software development as a whole or specialize in, say, debugging fatal errors in mid-sized system software. The latter would probably increase the probability of you fulfilling a niche but probably decrease the size of it.
Well, there already exists a version of this—a few orders of magnitude slower—where some groups of people decide to reproduce faster than other groups.
In real life the limiting factor is often that human children require resources, so too much reproduction may actually harm them by not leaving enough resources per child, so they are later unable to compete with those who received more resources. Another limiting factor is war, often over the resources. And yet another approach is to just let it happen and hope the problem will somehow solve itself, which actually sometimes happens (for example as groups of people get richer, they start valuing comfortable life more, which gets in the way of maximizing the number of their children). Also, sometimes the group actually wins, and then in the future its various subgroups have to compete against each other.
Also, there is the fact of human sexual reproduction, which means that the winning group does not have to exterminate the losing groups; it can also assimilate them. Here is probably the greatest difference compared with the Em scenario, which is like a return to asexual reproduction.
I have been considering the potential for demographic changes due to mind uploading to be even more extreme than you might initially think. This may be caused by people who are both willing to create massive numbers of copies of themselves and who are better suited for an economic niche than anyone else is for that niche, or at least anyone else willing to make very large numbers of copies of themselves. In such a situation, it would be more profitable for a firm to hire such a person than it would be for them to hire others, which may result it that niche being dominated by copies of that single individual.
For example, if there is one person who is better at software development than anyone else and is willing to make very large numbers of copies of themselves, there may end up being millions of copies of that one individual, all developing software.
However, there may be regulations to prevent such people from causing so many others to become unemployed. This may be done by limiting the numbers of copies people can make of themselves. I know little about politics, so feedback on this would be greatly appreciated.
Maximizing the number of copies of yourself may be desired, for example if you are a more effective altruist than most and thus want to maximize the resources available for you and your copies to do such kind acts. Or if you want a clone army.
Thus, I would very much like to know if this is a realistic consideration and how to maximize the number of copies you can make of yourself. It will probably be useful to avoid dying before mind-uploading occurs, get cryopreserved if you fail to do this, and become as skilled as possible at doing tasks that will be economically important in the future. I am unsure of how general or specific such tasks should be, for example if you should attempt to become an expert at software development as a whole or specialize in, say, debugging fatal errors in mid-sized system software. The latter would probably increase the probability of you fulfilling a niche but probably decrease the size of it.
Robin Hanson’s “The Age of Em” is a book about this sort of thing.
Well, there already exists a version of this—a few orders of magnitude slower—where some groups of people decide to reproduce faster than other groups.
In real life the limiting factor is often that human children require resources, so too much reproduction may actually harm them by not leaving enough resources per child, so they are later unable to compete with those who received more resources. Another limiting factor is war, often over the resources. And yet another approach is to just let it happen and hope the problem will somehow solve itself, which actually sometimes happens (for example as groups of people get richer, they start valuing comfortable life more, which gets in the way of maximizing the number of their children). Also, sometimes the group actually wins, and then in the future its various subgroups have to compete against each other.
Also, there is the fact of human sexual reproduction, which means that the winning group does not have to exterminate the losing groups; it can also assimilate them. Here is probably the greatest difference compared with the Em scenario, which is like a return to asexual reproduction.