Great piece, but one quibble — the examples in the productivity impacts section seem a little odd, because in some (all?) of these cases, the reason the person is so in-demand has to do with there being only one of them. And so duplicating them doesn’t solve this problem:
These people end up overbooked, with far more demands on their time than they can fulfill. Armies of other people end up devoted to saving their time and working around their schedules.
For example, while duplicating Sundar Pichai might make Google more successful (I don’t know a lot about him, but presumably he was a star employee and would be very effective in many roles), the reason he’s so in-demand is that he’s the CEO of Google. I don’t see how the existence of Clone-of-Sundar #235, who’s assigned to be some middle-manager, is going to relieve the pressure of people trying to get an audience with Sundar-the-Original, who’s the CEO (barring Parent Trap style twin-switcheroo shenanigans).
Similarly for Obama or Beyonce (I’m not so sure about Doudna) — wouldn’t meeting the former president or going to a Beyonce concert be less special if there were 1000 of them?
To me, the more obvious example of the type of person who’d be useful to copy would be some non-famous star individual contributor. Maybe someone like Steve Davis at SpaceX.
One benefit to meeting with the clone is you will get any advice or information that is the same as the original. In fact assuming truly identical duplicates a clone can be delegated the same credentials as the original. No reason not to, especially since the real duplicator technology is going to be perfect.
For an example today: you send a message to the Netflix account page wanting to update your credit card, using a web browser. Your computer is connecting to a “clone” of the server instance that does these updates. The cloned server has all the same privileges and can send an update to the database if the request checks out.
Similarly a clone of Sundar Pichai can write a check to buy your company equally with the original and Google will treat the check the same as if the original wrote it.
Similarly a clone of Sundar Pichai can write a check to buy your company equally with the original and Google will treat the check the same as if the original wrote it.
Sticking with the hypothetical where what we have is a Calvin-and-Hobbes-style duplicator, I don’t think this would work.
You can’t run a company with 100 different CEOs, even if at one point those people all had exactly the same memories. Sure, at the time of duplication, any one of the copies could be made the CEO. But from that point on their memories and the information they have access to will diverge. And you don’t want Sundar #42 randomly overruling a decision Sundar #35 made because he didn’t know about it.
So no, I don’t think they could all be given CEO-level decision making power (unless you also stipulate some super-coordination technology besides just the C&H-style duplicator).
Ok fair enough. I just cannot think of a physical realization of this duplication technology that wouldn’t also give you the ability to sync copies and/or freeze policy updates to a copy.
What “freezing policy updates” means is that the neural network is unable to learn, though there would be storage of local context data that gets saved to a database and flushed once the individual switches tasks.
Doing it this way means that all clones of Sundar Pichai remain immutable and semi-deterministic, such that you can treat a decision made by any one of them the same as any other. (like it is in the computer science equivalent).
But yes if you posit the ‘exactly like calvin & hobbs’, even though there is no plausible technology that would be able to do this yet not allow you to do other manipulations, since in order to clone someone’s mind you must be able to read and write values stored in it, therefore you are able to do all of the above.
Great piece, but one quibble — the examples in the productivity impacts section seem a little odd, because in some (all?) of these cases, the reason the person is so in-demand has to do with there being only one of them. And so duplicating them doesn’t solve this problem:
For example, while duplicating Sundar Pichai might make Google more successful (I don’t know a lot about him, but presumably he was a star employee and would be very effective in many roles), the reason he’s so in-demand is that he’s the CEO of Google. I don’t see how the existence of Clone-of-Sundar #235, who’s assigned to be some middle-manager, is going to relieve the pressure of people trying to get an audience with Sundar-the-Original, who’s the CEO (barring Parent Trap style twin-switcheroo shenanigans).
Similarly for Obama or Beyonce (I’m not so sure about Doudna) — wouldn’t meeting the former president or going to a Beyonce concert be less special if there were 1000 of them?
To me, the more obvious example of the type of person who’d be useful to copy would be some non-famous star individual contributor. Maybe someone like Steve Davis at SpaceX.
One benefit to meeting with the clone is you will get any advice or information that is the same as the original. In fact assuming truly identical duplicates a clone can be delegated the same credentials as the original. No reason not to, especially since the real duplicator technology is going to be perfect.
For an example today: you send a message to the Netflix account page wanting to update your credit card, using a web browser. Your computer is connecting to a “clone” of the server instance that does these updates. The cloned server has all the same privileges and can send an update to the database if the request checks out.
Similarly a clone of Sundar Pichai can write a check to buy your company equally with the original and Google will treat the check the same as if the original wrote it.
Sticking with the hypothetical where what we have is a Calvin-and-Hobbes-style duplicator, I don’t think this would work.
You can’t run a company with 100 different CEOs, even if at one point those people all had exactly the same memories. Sure, at the time of duplication, any one of the copies could be made the CEO. But from that point on their memories and the information they have access to will diverge. And you don’t want Sundar #42 randomly overruling a decision Sundar #35 made because he didn’t know about it.
So no, I don’t think they could all be given CEO-level decision making power (unless you also stipulate some super-coordination technology besides just the C&H-style duplicator).
Ok fair enough. I just cannot think of a physical realization of this duplication technology that wouldn’t also give you the ability to sync copies and/or freeze policy updates to a copy.
What “freezing policy updates” means is that the neural network is unable to learn, though there would be storage of local context data that gets saved to a database and flushed once the individual switches tasks.
Doing it this way means that all clones of Sundar Pichai remain immutable and semi-deterministic, such that you can treat a decision made by any one of them the same as any other. (like it is in the computer science equivalent).
But yes if you posit the ‘exactly like calvin & hobbs’, even though there is no plausible technology that would be able to do this yet not allow you to do other manipulations, since in order to clone someone’s mind you must be able to read and write values stored in it, therefore you are able to do all of the above.