= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
knb comments on Uploading: what about the carbon-based version? - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (49)
Or what if the 'mountain people' are utterly microscopic mites on a tiny ball hurling through space. Ohh, wait, that's the reality.
sidenote: I doubt mind uploads scale all the way up, and it appears quite likely that amoral mind uploads would be unable to get along with the copies, so I am not very worried about the first upload having any sort of edge. The first upload will probably be crippled and on the brink of insanity, suffering from hallucinations and otherwise broken thought (after massively difficult work to get this upload to be conscious and not to just go into simulated seizure ). From that you might progress to sane but stupefied uploads, with very significant IQ drop. Get a whiff of xenon to see what small alteration to electrical properties of the neurons amounts to. It will take a lot of gradual improvement until there are well working uploads, and even then I am pretty sure that nearly anyone would be utterly unable to massively self improve on one's own in any meaningful way rather than just screw itself into insanity, without supervision; sane person shouldn't even attempt that because if your improvement is making things worse then the next improvement will make things even worse, and one needs external verification.
Well, yes I am aware that my scenario is not literally descriptive of the world right now. The purpose is to inspire an intuitive understanding of why the economic reality of a society with strong upload technology would encourage destroying carbon copies of people who have been uploaded.
I am not worried either. Nothing I said assumes a first-mover advantage or hard takeoff from the first mind upload. I'm describing society after upload technology has matured.
I'm certainly not assuming uploads will be self-improving, so it seems you are pretty comprehensively misunderstanding my point. I do assume uploads will become faster, due to hardware improvements. After some time, the ease and low cost of copying uploads will likely make them far more numerous than physical humans, and their economic advantages (being able to do orders of magnitude more work per year than physical humans) will drive wages far below human subsistence standards (even if the wages allow a great lifestyle for the uploads).
That was more a note on the Dr_Manhattan's comment.
With regards to 'economic advantage', the advantage has to outgrow the overall growth for the state of carbon originals to decline. Also, you may want to read Accelerando by Charles Stross.
There is no reason why this would be true. The economy can grow enormously while per-capita income and standard of living fall. This has happened before, the global economy and population grew enormously after the transition to agriculture, but living standards probably actually fell, and farmers were shorter, poorer, harder-working and more malnourished than their forager ancestors. It is not inevitable (or even very likely, IMO) that the economy will perpetually outgrow population.
I read it years ago, and wasn't impressed. Why is that relevant?