I’m imagining a political system composed of “citizen units.” (Perhaps there is already an accepted terminology for my meaning? It doesn’t seem different from the classical idea of the family.) A given citizen unit might be a single individual or it might be a billion individuals all descended from the same initial model (if that model is still alive, he/she would also be part of the citizen unit). Regardless of the numeric size, each citizen unit is guaranteed certain rights, namely, X vote(s) in political elections, a basic income (perhaps some constant fraction of the economy), and protected autonomy. Multi-individual citizen units are free to arrange their internal organization however they choose. Citizen units engage with each other in economic transactions.
A citizen unit composed of a single individual may decide to copy itself (and thereby become a citizen unit of two individuals), but it must be able to afford to sustain those two individuals. Copying may be an investment (having an extra member of the citizen unit will yield an an income gain that covers the cost of keeping another individual) but it could also be accomplished by budgeting more tightly (just like families who decide to have a child today). Realistically, citizen units will face a tradeoff between making and keeping more copies and running (fewer individuals) faster.
Occasionally, citizen units will make bad decisions and will be forced to kill one or more of their member-individuals. (Though, I imagine that there would be a large amount of redundancy between copies. I think that instead of straight deletion, the memories of one copy might be folded into another similar copy: not killing, but re-merging. I don’t know if this is feasible.) However, this is the concern only of that citizen unit. As long as one is prudent, any citizen unit can expect to persist comfortably.
So long as the political boundary of “personhood” is kept firmly around the “citizen unit” instead of the individual, a general Malthusian trap is is of little threat. This is especially the case if citizens are guaranteed a basic income, which (given the technology-fueled mass unemployment and high per capita wealth that will likely accompany the lead up to Emulation Technology), may very well be standard by that time.
Is there some reason to expect that this model of personhood will not prevail? If it does, then what is the danger of a general Malthusian scenario?
There’s a continuum, where one end of the continuum is “exact copy” and the other end of the continuum is “basically a child, who starts out with few copied traits, and who can be influenced by the other members of the citizen unit but no more so than a child is today”. An individual can be a copy to a greater or lesser degree; being a copy isn’t a yes or no thing.
Assuming that people may still have children in this society, and that children have certain rights (such as eventually being permitted to move into separate citizen-units, or having the right not to be killed by the other members of the citizen-unit), you’re going to need to set up a boundary point between “member who cannot leave and can be killed” and “member who can leave and cannot be killed”. How are you going to do this?
(Bear in mind you also want to include cases such as copies that started out as exact copies but diverged sufficiently after X years.)
First of all, we could easily have something akin to child protective services, which protects the rights of marginalized individuals within citizen units. If individuals are being abused, they can be removed, and put with foster citizen units.
We may decide that actually, individuals don’t have the right to leave the citizen unit they were “born into”, but I do agree that I share some aversion to that idea. It is worth noting that in a society where the norm is existing in a close knit citizen unit of copies of varying similarity to you, individuals may have far less aversion to being unable to leave their C.U. (or leave it easily). It may be far less of a problem than it seems to us. Consider traditional societies where one’s family is of large cultural importance.
However, if we ignore the sociological pressures...
We need a system by which sufficiently deviated copies can appeal to get “divorced” or “emancipated”, but one that limits this occurrence so that the rate of citizen unit population growth doesn’t outpace that of the economy. This certainly puts a damper on the clean, simple, and automatic non-Malthusian-ness of my proposed system, but it doesn’t seem insurmountable. The problem is not so different than that of immigration regulation in our time.
The basic principle is that there should be a quota of new copies (or copy collectives, more likely) that can receive emancipation in a year. The number of this quota should be determined by the growth of the economy in that year.
We could disincentivize “divorces” or disincentivize making copies or even disincentivize only making copies that are sufficiently different from the original that the copy can be held to be morally independent of the actions of the citizen unit. Alternatively, we could incentivize “mergers”, in which separate citizen units (Is there a better name for these than citizen units?) combine to form a single, new citizen unit. Consider why many people decide not to have children today: cost, loss of freedom, ect.
some ideas:
We only allow the quota’ed number of new citizen units to be split off in a given year. When the number of applicants exceeds the spots available, they can chose to either continue as part of the citizen unit they were “born into” until a spot opens up, or they can enter a sort of suspended animation where they are run extremely slowly (or are even deactivated and digitally compressed) until a slot opens up.
Every citizen unit has a state mandated right to split up into two citizen units once in so many years. Individuals right to decide which of the new citizen units to join is protected. (This has some complications involving game theory and picking teams).
Individuals can break off from the citizen unit they were born into and join another (willing) citizen unit, whenever they mutually agree to do so.
New C.U.s can break off from old ones as long as they combine with another new C.U. that wants to break off.
If individuals are being abused, they can be removed, and put with foster citizen units.
How does that work? People are permitted to kill members of their own citizen units without penalty. If they can be killed without penalty, surely they can be abused without penalty too, right?
Of course you could say “they can be killed but they can’t be abused”, but that leads to problems. Can someone threaten a member of the same citizen unit with death or does that count as abuse? How do you determine abuse anyway (if I am about to duplicate myself, and I arrange a precommitment which results in one copy being abused and one copy benefitting, can the abused copy appeal to the anti-abuse law, thus essentially making such precommitments impossible?)
Consider traditional societies where one’s family is of large cultural importance.
Families are limited in what they can do to their members much more than members of CUs are limited. Furthermore, we consider some of the things those families were permitted do to be immoral nowadays (such as letting husbands abuse wives.)
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.
Not only is this feasible, this is in fact the usual default situation in a simple market economy.
I’m imagining a political system composed of “citizen units.” (Perhaps there is already an accepted terminology for my meaning? It doesn’t seem different from the classical idea of the family.) A given citizen unit might be a single individual or it might be a billion individuals all descended from the same initial model (if that model is still alive, he/she would also be part of the citizen unit). Regardless of the numeric size, each citizen unit is guaranteed certain rights, namely, X vote(s) in political elections, a basic income (perhaps some constant fraction of the economy), and protected autonomy. Multi-individual citizen units are free to arrange their internal organization however they choose. Citizen units engage with each other in economic transactions.
A citizen unit composed of a single individual may decide to copy itself (and thereby become a citizen unit of two individuals), but it must be able to afford to sustain those two individuals. Copying may be an investment (having an extra member of the citizen unit will yield an an income gain that covers the cost of keeping another individual) but it could also be accomplished by budgeting more tightly (just like families who decide to have a child today). Realistically, citizen units will face a tradeoff between making and keeping more copies and running (fewer individuals) faster.
Occasionally, citizen units will make bad decisions and will be forced to kill one or more of their member-individuals. (Though, I imagine that there would be a large amount of redundancy between copies. I think that instead of straight deletion, the memories of one copy might be folded into another similar copy: not killing, but re-merging. I don’t know if this is feasible.) However, this is the concern only of that citizen unit. As long as one is prudent, any citizen unit can expect to persist comfortably.
So long as the political boundary of “personhood” is kept firmly around the “citizen unit” instead of the individual, a general Malthusian trap is is of little threat. This is especially the case if citizens are guaranteed a basic income, which (given the technology-fueled mass unemployment and high per capita wealth that will likely accompany the lead up to Emulation Technology), may very well be standard by that time.
Is there some reason to expect that this model of personhood will not prevail? If it does, then what is the danger of a general Malthusian scenario?
There’s a continuum, where one end of the continuum is “exact copy” and the other end of the continuum is “basically a child, who starts out with few copied traits, and who can be influenced by the other members of the citizen unit but no more so than a child is today”. An individual can be a copy to a greater or lesser degree; being a copy isn’t a yes or no thing.
Assuming that people may still have children in this society, and that children have certain rights (such as eventually being permitted to move into separate citizen-units, or having the right not to be killed by the other members of the citizen-unit), you’re going to need to set up a boundary point between “member who cannot leave and can be killed” and “member who can leave and cannot be killed”. How are you going to do this?
(Bear in mind you also want to include cases such as copies that started out as exact copies but diverged sufficiently after X years.)
First of all, we could easily have something akin to child protective services, which protects the rights of marginalized individuals within citizen units. If individuals are being abused, they can be removed, and put with foster citizen units.
We may decide that actually, individuals don’t have the right to leave the citizen unit they were “born into”, but I do agree that I share some aversion to that idea. It is worth noting that in a society where the norm is existing in a close knit citizen unit of copies of varying similarity to you, individuals may have far less aversion to being unable to leave their C.U. (or leave it easily). It may be far less of a problem than it seems to us. Consider traditional societies where one’s family is of large cultural importance.
However, if we ignore the sociological pressures...
We need a system by which sufficiently deviated copies can appeal to get “divorced” or “emancipated”, but one that limits this occurrence so that the rate of citizen unit population growth doesn’t outpace that of the economy. This certainly puts a damper on the clean, simple, and automatic non-Malthusian-ness of my proposed system, but it doesn’t seem insurmountable. The problem is not so different than that of immigration regulation in our time.
The basic principle is that there should be a quota of new copies (or copy collectives, more likely) that can receive emancipation in a year. The number of this quota should be determined by the growth of the economy in that year.
We could disincentivize “divorces” or disincentivize making copies or even disincentivize only making copies that are sufficiently different from the original that the copy can be held to be morally independent of the actions of the citizen unit. Alternatively, we could incentivize “mergers”, in which separate citizen units (Is there a better name for these than citizen units?) combine to form a single, new citizen unit. Consider why many people decide not to have children today: cost, loss of freedom, ect.
some ideas:
We only allow the quota’ed number of new citizen units to be split off in a given year. When the number of applicants exceeds the spots available, they can chose to either continue as part of the citizen unit they were “born into” until a spot opens up, or they can enter a sort of suspended animation where they are run extremely slowly (or are even deactivated and digitally compressed) until a slot opens up.
Every citizen unit has a state mandated right to split up into two citizen units once in so many years. Individuals right to decide which of the new citizen units to join is protected. (This has some complications involving game theory and picking teams).
Individuals can break off from the citizen unit they were born into and join another (willing) citizen unit, whenever they mutually agree to do so.
New C.U.s can break off from old ones as long as they combine with another new C.U. that wants to break off.
How does that work? People are permitted to kill members of their own citizen units without penalty. If they can be killed without penalty, surely they can be abused without penalty too, right?
Of course you could say “they can be killed but they can’t be abused”, but that leads to problems. Can someone threaten a member of the same citizen unit with death or does that count as abuse? How do you determine abuse anyway (if I am about to duplicate myself, and I arrange a precommitment which results in one copy being abused and one copy benefitting, can the abused copy appeal to the anti-abuse law, thus essentially making such precommitments impossible?)
Families are limited in what they can do to their members much more than members of CUs are limited. Furthermore, we consider some of the things those families were permitted do to be immoral nowadays (such as letting husbands abuse wives.)
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.