I think I liked the first half of this article a lot, and thought the second half didn’t quite flesh it out with clear enough examples IMO. I like that it spells out the problem well though.
One note:
I don’t trust an arbitrary uploaded person (even an arbitrary LessWrong reader) to be “wise enough” to actually handle the situation correctly. I do think there are particular people who might do a good enough job.
I agree that you need to be very careful about who you upload. There are less than 10 people I would be really confident in uploading. That point must have been so obvious in my own mind that I forgot to mention it.
Depending on the setup I think an additional important property is how resistant the uploaded person is, to going insane. Not because the scan wasn’t perfect, or the emulation engine is buggy, but because you would be very lonely (assuming you only upload one person and don’t immediately clone yourself) if you run that much faster. And you need to handle some weird stuff about personal identity that comes up naturally, through cloning, simple self-modifications, your program being preempted by another process, changing your running speed, etc.
I think I liked the first half of this article a lot, and thought the second half didn’t quite flesh it out with clear enough examples IMO. I like that it spells out the problem well though.
One note:
I don’t trust an arbitrary uploaded person (even an arbitrary LessWrong reader) to be “wise enough” to actually handle the situation correctly. I do think there are particular people who might do a good enough job.
Thank you for the feedback. That’s useful.
I agree that you need to be very careful about who you upload. There are less than 10 people I would be really confident in uploading. That point must have been so obvious in my own mind that I forgot to mention it.
Depending on the setup I think an additional important property is how resistant the uploaded person is, to going insane. Not because the scan wasn’t perfect, or the emulation engine is buggy, but because you would be very lonely (assuming you only upload one person and don’t immediately clone yourself) if you run that much faster. And you need to handle some weird stuff about personal identity that comes up naturally, through cloning, simple self-modifications, your program being preempted by another process, changing your running speed, etc.