Transumanar

Comments on the debate between Robin Hanson and James Hughes on the social implications of uploads

I have been invited to comment on the debate between Robin Hanson and James Hughes on the social implications of uploads. I am happy to do so as I often think about mind uploading technology and its impact once it is developed. Please read Robin Hanson’s paper ”If uploads come first” for a background.

I hope brain scanning technology of sufficient quality and resolution for future uploading will become available during my lifetime. If this does not happen, I hope to transport myself to a future time where mind uploading technology exists through cryonics. I want to see what interesting things will happen in the future, and one point on which I completely agree with both Robin Hanson and James Hughes is that operational uploading technology will have a huge impact on our world, including of course economics and politics.

So suppose you have a complete brain scan before you die, and you wake up in sometime in the future. You could wake up in another biologic body, in a robotic body, or as a conscious personality in a virtual world running on some future supercomputer. You may now be thinking of a virtual heaven, but you should think also of a virtual hell: you have been restored to be a slave in a future data processing farm - you are chained to a virtual metal chair that glows white hot as soon as you slow down - errors are punished with virtual torture. Or perhaps you are just tortured for fun. And this may be happening simultaneously to millions of parallel copies of you. Science fiction writer Richard K. Morgan has some particularly vivid descriptions of uploads tortured in virtual hells.

Unfortunately we have a history of practicing slavery for economic advantage whenever we can do so without consequences. Even in today’s world, there would be widespread slavery if we did not have anti-slavery laws and the means to enforce them. Actually, in today’s world there *is* slavery. I do not believe this basic fact - that there are always many people ready to do the most horrible things for money, and even a few people ready to do the most horrible things just for fun - may change anytime soon. So, it is clear that we will need laws and technologies to make sure uploads are not used as slaves. Perhaps the required technologies will be developed as an evolution of today’s Digital Rights Management technologies. But of course, there will be crackers who will find ways to work around DRM protections for uploads. This will be a *very* important and complex issue.

Leaving virtual hells aside, one central point in the debate between Robin Hanson and James Hughes on the social implications of uploads is how to modify economical and political systems to permit coping with a society split between “original humans” and uploads.

But I do not think future societies will be split between pure original humans and pure uploads (and, I should add, pure artificial intelligences). On the contrary, I think that with the development and deployment of mind copy/cut/paste technologies, the pure modes of existence for conscious minds will blend and merge. I imagine a typical person in such a world as a computational construct, spending most of ver (a blend of his and her - the notion of gender will become obsolete) time in virtual reality, using one or more physical bodies on a need basis, augmenting verself with AI subsystems, merging with others, spawning multiple copies, and copying/pasting ver memories and mental subsystems in all sorts of ways that we cannot even begin to imagine. Within the limits of our current imagination, a possible advanced future society is described in Greg Egan‘s Diaspora. The detailed fabric of economy and politics in such societies is probably completely beyond our understanding at this time.

But the first successful experiments in uploading may well take place before the end of this century, in a society relatively similar to ours. So current economic and political models will still apply during and after the initial deployment wave of uploading technology, and it is very important to start thinking of how we can cope with this very disruptive change.

Posted by G.P. on 01/04 at 06:17 AM
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