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!
And then Dr. Evil, forced to compete with 999,999,999,999 copies of himself that all want to rule, is back to square one. Would you see multiplying your competition by 999,999,999,999 as a solution to how to rule the universe? If you were as selfish as Dr. Evil, and intelligent enough to try attempting to take over the universe, wouldn't it occur to you that the copies are all going to want to be the one in charge? Perhaps it won't, but if it did, would you try multiplying your competition, then? If not, then maybe part of the solution to this is making it common knowledge that multiplying your competition by nearly a trillion isn't going to gain you any power.
That wouldn't keep trolls and idiots from trying it, though, and even though they'd be divided against themselves once they were there, which would probably make it impossible for any one of them to rule, it doesn't mean they wouldn't do heinous things like vote their way into some sort of preferred class. I just don't think a trillion copies of a selfish person would result in the original person ruling is all.
Assume the least convenient possible world; the copies are united against the noncopies.