Give all the drugs to one person. That one person gets hits by a car crossing the street. You’ve lost -all- your utility.
Similarly, your one EM goes insane.
Your marginal utility calculations don’t include -risk-.
The odds of dying in a plane crash are, approximately, one in one million, for a one hour flight. Assuming one flight per month—this is an important person, remember—your actual expected lifetime extension is short the mass value by hundreds of billions. The gains from giving it all to one person are in the hundreds of millions. “All the eggs in one basket” results in massive net loss.
I can’t find odds of a healthy mind going insane, but I suspect they’re substantially higher than those of dying in a plane crash. Especially in the case of an emulated mind which is outside its “comfort” zone, and -way- outside the lifespan for which that mind has evolved. That is of course assuming an adequately emulated brain.
There are other issues, but this hurdle seems the most obvious.
I Googled it and went with the first answer I found, although checking the sources of my source, their numbers are off by a factor of eight; should be around eight million. Which means it would take an average of ~250,000 years to die in the plane crash, rather than the ~20,000 years I originally estimated. The argument remains intact, however; it would take another couple orders of magnitude to marginalize the risk for somebody whose life expectancy is in the hundreds of billions of years, and probably three orders of magnitude to eliminate it as a consideration here.
Give all the drugs to one person. That one person gets hits by a car crossing the street. You’ve lost -all- your utility.
Similarly, your one EM goes insane.
Your marginal utility calculations don’t include -risk-.
The odds of dying in a plane crash are, approximately, one in one million, for a one hour flight. Assuming one flight per month—this is an important person, remember—your actual expected lifetime extension is short the mass value by hundreds of billions. The gains from giving it all to one person are in the hundreds of millions. “All the eggs in one basket” results in massive net loss.
I can’t find odds of a healthy mind going insane, but I suspect they’re substantially higher than those of dying in a plane crash. Especially in the case of an emulated mind which is outside its “comfort” zone, and -way- outside the lifespan for which that mind has evolved. That is of course assuming an adequately emulated brain.
There are other issues, but this hurdle seems the most obvious.
Where did you get that number?
I Googled it and went with the first answer I found, although checking the sources of my source, their numbers are off by a factor of eight; should be around eight million. Which means it would take an average of ~250,000 years to die in the plane crash, rather than the ~20,000 years I originally estimated. The argument remains intact, however; it would take another couple orders of magnitude to marginalize the risk for somebody whose life expectancy is in the hundreds of billions of years, and probably three orders of magnitude to eliminate it as a consideration here.