If it is the possibility of large amounts of torture that bothers you, instead of large ratios of torture experience relative to other better experience, then any growing future should bother you, and you should just want to end civilization. But if it is ratios that concern you, then since torture isn't usually profitable, most em experience won't be torture. Even if some bad folks being rich means they could afford a lot of torture, that would still be a small fraction of total experience.

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.

The answer seems fairly simple to me. You're not in any position to decide the risks others assume. If you're concerned about the potential torture the only mind you can really do anything about is yours -- you don't run around killing everyone else, just yourself.

Let me also add that while a sadist can parallelize torture, it's also possible to parallelize euphoria, so maybe that mitigates things to some extent.

We don't live in a universe that's nice or just all the time, so perhaps there are nightmare scenarios in our future. Not all traps have an escape. However, I think this one does, for two reasons.

(1) all the reasons that RobinHanson mentioned;

(2) we seem really confused about how consciousness works, which suggests there are large 'unknown unknowns' in play. It seems very likely that if we extrapolate our confused models of consciousness into extreme scenarios such as this, we'll get even more confused results.

This actually reminds me of an argument I had with some Negative-Leaning Utilitarians on the old Felicifia forums. Basically, a common concern for them was how r-selected species tend to appear to suffer way more than be happy, generally speaking, and that this can imply that was should try to reduce the suffering by eliminating those species or at least avoiding the expansion of life generally to other planets.

I likened this line of reasoning to the idea that we should Nuke The Rainforest.

Personally I think a similar counterargument to that argument applies here as well. Translated into your thought experiment, it would be In essence, that while it is true that some percentage of minds will probably end up being tortured by sadists, this is likely to be outweighed by the sheer number of minds that are even more likely to be uploaded into some kind of utopian paradise. Given that truly psychopathic sadism is actually quite rare in the general population, one would expect a very similar ratio of simulations. In the long run, the optimistic view is that decency will prevail and that the net happiness will be positive, so we should not go around trying to blender brains.

As for the general issue of terrible human decisions being incentivized by these things... humans are capable of using all sorts of rationalizations to justify terrible decisions, and so, just the possibility that some people will not do due diligence with an idea and instead abuse it to justify their evil, should not be reason to abandon the idea by itself.

For instance, the possibility of living an indefinite lifespan is likely to dramatically alter people's behaviour, including making them more risk-averse and long term thinking. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it could lead to a reduction in people making necessary sacrifices for the good. These things are also, generally notoriously difficult to predict. Ask a medieval peasant what the effects of machines that could farm vast swaths of land would be on the economy and their livelihood and you'd probably get a very parochially minded answer.

This sounds like the standard argument around negative utility.

if you weight negative utility quite highly then you could also come to the conclusion that the moral thing to do is to set to work on a virus to kill all humans as fast as possible.

You don't even need mind-uploading. If you weight suffering highly enough then you could decide that it's the right thing to do taking a trip to a refugee camp full of people who, on average, are likely to have hard, painful lives, and leaving a sarin gas bomb.

Put another way: if you encountered an infant with epidermolysis bullosa would you try to kill them, even against their wishes?

If you take the economic perspective (such as I understand R. Hanson's version to be), the only simulations we will ever run at scale are those that generate profits.

Torture is a money-sink with no economic value other than blackmail.

So torture in simulations will necessarily be marginalized (esp. so if humanity becomes better at pre-commitment to not respond to blackmail).

morality is about acausal contracts between counterfactual agents, and I do not want my future defended in this way. I don't care what you think of my suffering; if you try to kill me to prevent my suffering, I'll try to kill you back.