Eh. "Talk to" in this case is quite broad. It doesn't just literally mean actually talking to them; it means reading books that you wouldn't have written that contain ideas you wouldn't have thought of, seeing movies that you wouldn't have filmed, playing games from very different points of view, ect. If all culture, music, art, and idea all came from minds that were very similar, I think it would tend to get boring much more quickly.
I do think there is a significant risk that an individual or a society might drift into a stable, stagnant, boring state over time, and interaction and social friction with a variety of fundamentally different minds could be a huge effect on that.
And, of course, there is a more practical reason why everyone would want to ban massive copying of single minds, which is that it would dramatically reduce the resources and standard of living of any one mind. A society of EM's would urgently need some form of population control.
Edit: By the way, there also wouldn't necessarily be even the limited diversity you might expect from having different versions of you diverge over centuries. In the kind of environment we're talking about here, less competitive versions of you would also be wiped out by more competitive versions of you, leaving only a very narrow band of the diversity you yourself would be capable of becoming.
Completely agreed about "talk to" being metaphorical. Indeed, it would astonish me if over the course of few centuries of the kind of technological development implied by whole-brain-emulation, we didn't develop means of interaction with ourselves and others that made the whole notion of concerning ourselves with identity boundaries in the first place a barely intelligible historical artifact for most minds. But I digress.
That aside, I agree that interaction with "fundamentally different minds" could have a huge effect on our tendency t...
At some point in the future we may be able to scan someone's brain at very high resolution and "run" them on a computer. [1] When I first heard this as a teenager I thought it was interesting but not hugely important. Running people faster or slower and keeping backups came immediately to mind, and Wikipedia adds space travel, but those three by themselves don't seem like they change that much. Thinking speed doesn't seem to be major limiting factor in coming up with good ideas, we generally only restore from backups in cases of rare failure, and while space travel would dramatically affect the ability of humans to spread [2] it doesn't sound like it changes the conditions of life.
This actually undersells emulation by quite a lot. For example "backups" let you repeatedly run the same copy of a person on different information. You can find identify a person when they're at their intellectual or creative best, and give them an hour to think about a new situation. Add in potentially increased simulation speed and parallelism, and you could run lots of these ones looking into all sorts of candidate approaches to problems.
With emulations you can get around the mental overhead of keeping all your assumptions about a direction of thought in your mind at once. I might not know if X is true, and spend a while thinking about what should happen if it's true and another while about what if it's not, but it's hard for me to get past the problem that I'm still uncertain about X. With an emulation that you can reset to a saved state however, you could have multiple runs where you give some emulations a strong assurance that X is true and some a strong assurance that X is false
You can also run randomized controlled trials where the experimental group and the control group are the same person. This should hugely bring down experimental cost and noise, allowing us to make major and rapid progress in discovering what works in education, motivation, and productivity.
(Backups stop being about error recovery and fundamentally change the way an emulation is useful.)
These ideas aren't new here [3] but I don't see them often in discussions of the impact of emulating people. I also suspect there are many more creative ways of using emulation; what else could you do with it?
[1] I think this is a long way off but don't see any reasons why it wouldn't be possible.
[2] Which has a big effect on estimates of the number of future people.
[3] I think most of these ideas fo back to Carl Schulman's 2010 Whole Brain Emulation and the Evolution of Superorganisms.
I also posted this on my blog