Error comments on How sure are you that brain emulations would be conscious? - Less Wrong

15 Post author: ChrisHallquist 26 August 2013 06:21AM

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Comment author: Error 27 August 2013 08:35:57PM 1 point [-]

Assuming you're aiming to refer to creating humans:

It seems to me that there's a qualitative difference between current methods of creating voters (i.e. childbearing) and creating a whole ton of emulations. Our current methods are distributed, slow, have a long time gap (so time discounting applies to incentives), and there are better options for abuse of authority than breeding new voters. Whereas effectively free creation of human-equivalent ems is fast, centralized, has effectively no time gap, and could easily warp the political context, assuming "political context" still matters in such a world.

But I think even thinking about voting rights for ems is solving the wrong problem. If we as a society determine that ems ought to have the rights and privileges of citizens, but doing so completely breaks democracy as we know it, it is likely that the proper response is not to rearrange voting rights, but to simply replace democracy with Something Else that better fits the new situation.

Democracy isn't immutable. If it doesn't work, find something else that does.