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MileyCyrus comments on "Ray Kurzweil and Uploading: Just Say No!", Nick Agar - Less Wrong
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If you postulate ems that can run a million subjective years a minute (which is not at all scientifically plausible), the mainline copies can do that as well, which means talking about wall clock time at all is misleading; the new subjective timescale is the appropriate one to use across the board.
As for the rest, people are just as greedy today as they will be in the future. Organized criminals could torture you until you agree to sign over your property to them. Your girlfriend could pour petrol over you and set you on fire while you're asleep. If you sign up for a delivery or service with Apple and give them your home address, you're trusting them not to send thugs around to your house and kidnap you. Ever fly on an airliner? Very few, perhaps no one, will have the engineering skill to fly without someone else's assistance. When you're on the plane, you're trusting the airline not to deliver you to a torture camp. Is anyone worthy of that trust? And even if you get home safely, how will you stay safe while you're asleep? And how will you protect yourself against criminals?
Does committing suicide today sound a more plausible idea now?
Now you're just getting snarky.
This document is a bit old, but:
No one can hurt me today the way I could be hurt in a post-em world. In a world where human capacity for malevolence is higher, more precaution is required. One should not rule out suicide as a precaution against being tortured for subjective billions of years.
I've been snarky for this entire conversation - I find advocacy of death extremely irritating - but I am not just snarky by any means. The laws of physics as now understood allow no such thing, and even the author of the document to which you refer - a master of wishful thinking - now regards it as obsolete and wrong. And the point still holds - you cannot benefit today the way you could in a post-em world. If you're prepared to throw away billions of years of life as a precaution against the possibility of billions of years of torture, you should be prepared to throw away decades of life as a precaution against the possibility of decades of torture. If you aren't prepared to do the latter, you should reconsider the former.
I rather subscribe to how Greg Egan describes what the author is doing: