It’s the year 2045, and Dr. Evil and the Singularity Institute have been in a long and grueling race to be the first to achieve machine intelligence, thereby controlling the course of the Singularity and the fate of the universe. Unfortunately for Dr. Evil, SIAI is ahead in the game. Its Friendly AI is undergoing final testing, and Coherent Extrapolated Volition is scheduled to begin in a week. Dr. Evil learns of this news, but there’s not much he can do, or so it seems. He has succeeded in developing brain scanning and emulation technology, but the emulation speed is still way too slow to be competitive.
There is no way to catch up with SIAI's superior technology in time, but Dr. Evil suddenly realizes that maybe he doesn’t have to. CEV is supposed to give equal weighting to all of humanity, and surely uploads count as human. If he had enough storage space, he could simply upload himself, and then make a trillion copies of the upload. The rest of humanity would end up with less than 1% weight in CEV. Not perfect, but he could live with that. Unfortunately he only has enough storage for a few hundred uploads. What to do…
Ah ha, compression! A trillion identical copies of an object would compress down to be only a little bit larger than one copy. But would CEV count compressed identical copies to be separate individuals? Maybe, maybe not. To be sure, Dr. Evil gives each copy a unique experience before adding it to the giant compressed archive. Since they still share almost all of the same information, a trillion copies, after compression, just manages to fit inside the available space.
Now Dr. Evil sits back and relaxes. Come next week, the Singularity Institute and rest of humanity are in for a rather rude surprise!
Alicorn, who I think is more of an expert on this topic than most, had this to say:
Just the other day I debated with PhilGoetz whether utilitarianism is supposed to imply agent-neutrality or not. I still don't know what most people mean on that issue.
Even assuming agent neutrality there is a major difference between average and total utilitarianism. Then there are questions about whether you weight agents equally or differently based on some criteria. The question of whether/how to weight animals or other non-human entities is a subset of that question.
Given all these questions it tells me very little about what ethical system is being discussed when someone uses the word 'utilitarian'.
It does substantially reduce the decision space. For example, it is generally a safe-bet that the individual is not going to subscribe to deontological claims that say "killing humans is always bad." I'd thus be very surprised to ever meet a pacifist utilitarian.
It probably is fair to say that given the space of ethical systems generally discussed on LW, talking about utilitarianism doesn't narrow the field down much from that space.