This scenario is rather different than the one suggested by TedHowardNZ, and has a better chance of working. However:
Is there some reason to expect that this model of personhood will not prevail?
One of the issues is that less efficient CUs have to defend their resources against more efficient CUs (who spend more of their resources on work/competition). Depending on the precise structure of your society, those attacks may e.g. be military, algorithmic (information security), memetic or political. You’d need a setup that allows the less efficient CUs to maintain their resource share indefinitely. I question that we know how to set this up.
If it does, then what is the danger of a general Malthusian scenario?
The word “general” is tricky here. Note that CUs that spend most of their resources on instantiating busy EMs will probably end up with more human-like population per CU, and so (counting in human-like entities) may end up dominating the population of their society unless they are rare compared to low-population, high-subjective-wealth CUs. This society may end up not unlike the current one in wealth distribution, where a very few human-scale entities are extremely wealthy, but the vast majority of them are not.
One of the issues is that less efficient CUs have to defend their resources against more efficient CUs (who spend more of their resources on work/competition)
I am assuming (for now), a monopoly of power that enforces law and order and prevents crimes between C.U.s.
Note that CUs that spend most of their resources on instantiating busy EMs will probably end up with more human-like population per CU, and so (counting in human-like entities) may end up dominating the population of their society unless they are rare compared to low-population, high-subjective-wealth CUs.
I am assuming (for now), a monopoly of power that enforces law and order and prevents crimes between C.U.s.
Any system becomes feasible once you assume a monopoly on power able to enforce an arbitrary law code. Of course, if you think about where the monopoly comes from you’re back to a singleton scenario.
To the extent that CUs are made up of human-like entities (as opposed to e.g. more flexible intelligences that can scale to effectively use all their resources), one of the choices they need to make is how large an internal population to keep, where higher populations imply less resources per person (since the amount of resources per CU is constant).
Therefore, unless the high-internal-population CUs are rare, most of the human-level population will be in them, and won’t have resources of the same level as the smaller numbers of people in low-population CUs.
This scenario is rather different than the one suggested by TedHowardNZ, and has a better chance of working. However:
One of the issues is that less efficient CUs have to defend their resources against more efficient CUs (who spend more of their resources on work/competition). Depending on the precise structure of your society, those attacks may e.g. be military, algorithmic (information security), memetic or political. You’d need a setup that allows the less efficient CUs to maintain their resource share indefinitely. I question that we know how to set this up.
The word “general” is tricky here. Note that CUs that spend most of their resources on instantiating busy EMs will probably end up with more human-like population per CU, and so (counting in human-like entities) may end up dominating the population of their society unless they are rare compared to low-population, high-subjective-wealth CUs. This society may end up not unlike the current one in wealth distribution, where a very few human-scale entities are extremely wealthy, but the vast majority of them are not.
I am assuming (for now), a monopoly of power that enforces law and order and prevents crimes between C.U.s.
I don’t follow this. Can you elaborate?
Any system becomes feasible once you assume a monopoly on power able to enforce an arbitrary law code. Of course, if you think about where the monopoly comes from you’re back to a singleton scenario.
To the extent that CUs are made up of human-like entities (as opposed to e.g. more flexible intelligences that can scale to effectively use all their resources), one of the choices they need to make is how large an internal population to keep, where higher populations imply less resources per person (since the amount of resources per CU is constant).
Therefore, unless the high-internal-population CUs are rare, most of the human-level population will be in them, and won’t have resources of the same level as the smaller numbers of people in low-population CUs.