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Sebastian_Hagen comments on Superintelligence 18: Life in an algorithmic economy - Less Wrong
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I'm imagining a political system composed of "citizen units." (Perhaps there is already an accepted terminology for my meaning? It doesn't seem different from the classical idea of the family.) A given citizen unit might be a single individual or it might be a billion individuals all descended from the same initial model (if that model is still alive, he/she would also be part of the citizen unit). Regardless of the numeric size, each citizen unit is guaranteed certain rights, namely, X vote(s) in political elections, a basic income (perhaps some constant fraction of the economy), and protected autonomy. Multi-individual citizen units are free to arrange their internal organization however they choose. Citizen units engage with each other in economic transactions.
A citizen unit composed of a single individual may decide to copy itself (and thereby become a citizen unit of two individuals), but it must be able to afford to sustain those two individuals. Copying may be an investment (having an extra member of the citizen unit will yield an an income gain that covers the cost of keeping another individual) but it could also be accomplished by budgeting more tightly (just like families who decide to have a child today). Realistically, citizen units will face a tradeoff between making and keeping more copies and running (fewer individuals) faster.
Occasionally, citizen units will make bad decisions and will be forced to kill one or more of their member-individuals. (Though, I imagine that there would be a large amount of redundancy between copies. I think that instead of straight deletion, the memories of one copy might be folded into another similar copy: not killing, but re-merging. I don't know if this is feasible.) However, this is the concern only of that citizen unit. As long as one is prudent, any citizen unit can expect to persist comfortably.
So long as the political boundary of "personhood" is kept firmly around the "citizen unit" instead of the individual, a general Malthusian trap is is of little threat. This is especially the case if citizens are guaranteed a basic income, which (given the technology-fueled mass unemployment and high per capita wealth that will likely accompany the lead up to Emulation Technology), may very well be standard by that time.
Is there some reason to expect that this model of personhood will not prevail? If it does, then what is the danger of a general Malthusian scenario?
This scenario is rather different than the one suggested by TedHowardNZ, and has a better chance of working. However:
One of the issues is that less efficient CUs have to defend their resources against more efficient CUs (who spend more of their resources on work/competition). Depending on the precise structure of your society, those attacks may e.g. be military, algorithmic (information security), memetic or political. You'd need a setup that allows the less efficient CUs to maintain their resource share indefinitely. I question that we know how to set this up.
The word "general" is tricky here. Note that CUs that spend most of their resources on instantiating busy EMs will probably end up with more human-like population per CU, and so (counting in human-like entities) may end up dominating the population of their society unless they are rare compared to low-population, high-subjective-wealth CUs. This society may end up not unlike the current one in wealth distribution, where a very few human-scale entities are extremely wealthy, but the vast majority of them are not.
I am assuming (for now), a monopoly of power that enforces law and order and prevents crimes between C.U.s.
I don't follow this. Can you elaborate?
Any system becomes feasible once you assume a monopoly on power able to enforce an arbitrary law code. Of course, if you think about where the monopoly comes from you're back to a singleton scenario.
To the extent that CUs are made up of human-like entities (as opposed to e.g. more flexible intelligences that can scale to effectively use all their resources), one of the choices they need to make is how large an internal population to keep, where higher populations imply less resources per person (since the amount of resources per CU is constant).
Therefore, unless the high-internal-population CUs are rare, most of the human-level population will be in them, and won't have resources of the same level as the smaller numbers of people in low-population CUs.