"I am precommiting that anyone who cloned themselves a trillion times gets all their clones killed. This precommitment will prevent anyone who genuinely understands my source code from having cloned themselves in the past, and will therefore increase utility."
Wait, increase utility according to what utility function? If it's an aggregate utility function where Dr. Evil has 99% weight, then why would that precommitment increase utility?
Wait, increase utility according to what utility function?
The current CEV of humanity, or your best estimate of it, I think. If someone forces us to kill orphans or they'll destroy the world, saving the world is higher utility, but we still want to punish the guy who made it so.
I think that's where the idea came from, anyway; I agree with Yvain that it doesn't work.
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!