Hm. Actually, I’m not sure that your desire for more copies of yourself is really comparable with biological-style reproduction at all.
As I understand it, the fact that your copies would definitely share your values and be inclined to cooperate with you is a major factor in your interest in creating them—doing so is a reliable way of getting more paperclips made. I expect you’d be less interested in making copies if there was a significant chance that those copies would value piles of pebbles, or cheesecakes, or OpenOffice, rather than valuing paperclips. And that is a situation that we face—in some ways, our values are mutable enough that even an exact genetic clone isn’t guaranteed to share our specific values, and in fact a given individual may even have very different values at different points in time. (Remember, we’re adaptation executors. Sanity isn’t a requirement for that kind of system to work.) The closest we come to doing what you’re functionally doing when you make copies of yourself is probably creating organizations—getting a bunch of humans together who are either self-selected to share certain values, or who are paid to act as if they share those values.
Interestingly, I suspect that filling gender roles—especially the non-reproductive aspects of said roles—is one of the adaptations that we execute that allow us to more easily band together like that.
At the moment, we don’t know how to do that. I’m not sure what we’d wind up doing if we did know how—the simplest way of making sure that two beings have the same values over time is to give those beings values that don’t change, and that’s different enough from how humans work that I’m not sure the resulting beings could be considered human. Also, even disregarding our human-centric tendencies, I don’t expect that that change would appeal to many people: We actually value some subsets of the tendency to change our values, particularly the parts labeled “personal growth”.
Hm. Actually, I’m not sure that your desire for more copies of yourself is really comparable with biological-style reproduction at all.
As I understand it, the fact that your copies would definitely share your values and be inclined to cooperate with you is a major factor in your interest in creating them—doing so is a reliable way of getting more paperclips made. I expect you’d be less interested in making copies if there was a significant chance that those copies would value piles of pebbles, or cheesecakes, or OpenOffice, rather than valuing paperclips. And that is a situation that we face—in some ways, our values are mutable enough that even an exact genetic clone isn’t guaranteed to share our specific values, and in fact a given individual may even have very different values at different points in time. (Remember, we’re adaptation executors. Sanity isn’t a requirement for that kind of system to work.) The closest we come to doing what you’re functionally doing when you make copies of yourself is probably creating organizations—getting a bunch of humans together who are either self-selected to share certain values, or who are paid to act as if they share those values.
Interestingly, I suspect that filling gender roles—especially the non-reproductive aspects of said roles—is one of the adaptations that we execute that allow us to more easily band together like that.
Very informative! But why don’t you change yourselves so that your copies must share your values?
At the moment, we don’t know how to do that. I’m not sure what we’d wind up doing if we did know how—the simplest way of making sure that two beings have the same values over time is to give those beings values that don’t change, and that’s different enough from how humans work that I’m not sure the resulting beings could be considered human. Also, even disregarding our human-centric tendencies, I don’t expect that that change would appeal to many people: We actually value some subsets of the tendency to change our values, particularly the parts labeled “personal growth”.