Umm, stop waving your hands and start putting some estimates down. Especially when you say things like
Over a long enough timeline, the probability of a copy of any given uploaded mind falling into the power of a sadistic jerk approaches unity.
You show an inability to actually figure out the relative frequencies that would make this true or false. There's lots of ways this could be false - most notably there may be dozens of orders of magnitude more uploaded minds than sadistic jerks, and any nonzero cost of running a mind means the SJs simply can't afford to torture most of them.
Once an uploaded mind has fallen under the power of a sadistic jerk, there is no guarantee that it will ever be 'free', and the quantity of experienced sufferring could be arbitrarily large, due in part to the embarrassingly parallel nature of torture enabled by running multiple copies of a captive mind.
More unstated assumptions (with which I think I disagree). How are you aggregating suffering (or value generally) for minds? Do you think that identical tortures for two copies of a mind is different than torture of one? Why? Do you think that any amount of future potential torture can remove the value of current pleasure? Why?
Even if you try to just quantify "value * experienced-seconds" and simply multiply, it's going to be hard to think anyone is better off NOT being uploaded.
Feel free to make choices for yourself, and even to advocate others to securely erase their information-patterns before it's too late. But without a lot more clear probability estimates and aggregation methodology, I think I'll take my chances and seek to continue living.
For the sake of argument, some numbers to match the assumptions you named. Let's base these assumptions on some numbers available to Americans today, rounded to even numbers in the direction least favorable to my argument.
Percentage of population that are psychopaths: 1% (two orders of magnitude more non psychopaths than psychopaths exist today) Probability of being victim of violent crime varies a lot based on demographics, 10 per 1000 per year is reasonable...so 1% Power consumption of human mind: 20W (based on the human brain, we will not hit this imme...
I need help getting out of a logical trap I've found myself in after reading The Age of Em.
Some statements needed to set the trap:
If mind-uploading is possible, then a mind can theoretically exist for an arbitrary length of time.
If a mind is contained in software, it can be copied, and therefore can be stolen.
An uploaded mind can retain human attributes indefinitely.
Some subset of humans are sadistic jerks, many of these humans have temporal power.
All humans, under certain circumstances, can behave like sadistic jerks.
Human power relationships will not simply disappear with the advent of mind uploading.
Some minor negative implications:
Torture becomes embarrassingly parallel.
US states with the death penalty may adopt death plus simulation as a penalty for some offenses.
The trap:
Over a long enough timeline, the probability of a copy of any given uploaded mind falling into the power of a sadistic jerk approaches unity. Once an uploaded mind has fallen under the power of a sadistic jerk, there is no guarantee that it will ever be 'free', and the quantity of experienced sufferring could be arbitrarily large, due in part to the embarrassingly parallel nature of torture enabled by running multiple copies of a captive mind.
Therefore! If you believe that mind uploading will become possible in a given individual's lifetime, the most ethical thing you can do from the utilitarian standpoint of minimizing aggregate suffering, is to ensure that the person's mind is securely deleted before it can be uploaded.
Imagine the heroism of a soldier, who faced with capture by an enemy capable of uploading minds and willing to parallelize torture spends his time ensuring that his buddies' brains are unrecoverable at the cost of his own capture.
I believe that mind uploading will become possible in my lifetime, please convince me that running through the streets with a blender screaming for brains is not an example of effective altruism.
On a more serious note, can anyone else think of examples of really terrible human decisions that would be incentivised by the development of AGI or mind uploading? This problem appears related to AI safety.