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NancyLebovitz comments on Ideas wanted: democracy in an Em world - Less Wrong
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Democracy is a political system used by meat-based, baseline humans, who are all fundamentally very similar. The greatest variation is that between Einstein and the village idiot, but 99% of people are far from either extreme.
One of the key ideas leading to democracy is equal rights. It makes sense to give all humans equal rights because their abilities, needs, and desires are really very similar. But ems inhabit a far greater class of possible behaviors, abilities, needs and desires. It's not clear to me why it even makes sense to consider a democracy of ems.
Another problem is that, as you point out, a one instance-one vote system would create a huge artificial restriction on the creation of legal copies. Creating copies is probably very desirable for anyone rich enough to run them. So the only possible outcomes are either a huge majority of disenfranchised copies created without a license, or else a huge illegal underworld of copies that is brutally repressed by the government because, once a copy is created, they have to grant it full rights.
Just look at the state of modern copyright (and patents) - a huge artificial legal restriction on the proliferation of software. Then imagine copyright applied to sentient beings. Enforcing a system of government licensing of em copying would mean enforcing the non-existence of free software and open hardware, or any software or hardware free from government control.
An alternative might be to grant new copies votes after a some moderate period of time so that they've diverged from the original. This no doubt has its own problems, but it's at least good enough for science fiction.
A requirement to have a percentage of divergence would be too easy to hack.
In a sense, we do that now. You're free to have children and teach them your values, but they can't vote for 18 years.
Do you think this idea can be generalised to Ems?
We can generalise votes to carry different weights. Starting today, everyone who currently has one vote continues to have one vote. When someone makes a copy (electronic or flesh), their voting power is divided between themselves and the copy. The total amount of voting power is conserved and, assuming that copies default to the political opinion of their prototypes, the political landscape only moves when someone changes their mind.
Dubious at best. Ems could be designed to not diverge, and there's evolutionary pressure towards doing so.
It would at least keep people from just multiplying themselves right before an election and then merging them again right after.
Or maybe when they've been demonstrated to have assimilated the values of the rest of the population.
No way THAT could go wrong...
There are several modes by which that could fail. For example, if the beings have simply mastered a classifier indistinguishable from a typical population member in polynomial time under an adaptive interactive proof protocol (similar to the so-called "Turing Test"), while actually implementing a (source-code-uninspectable) program hostile to that value system.
Children already have high correlation with their parent's politics (and more so with their parent's religion, caste, etc.). And they tend to act together as families / clans. This will grow far stronger with ems who can design their diverged-copies more precisely than humans can raise their children, and who have much greater incentives to vote as family units (shorter generation time = stronger selection pressure to outbreed other families).
If the government mandates how the children must be different from the parent, with the goal that they vote differently from the parent, that doesn't seem very different from the government just dispensing with voting and setting the policy itself.