Clearly, there's the immediate incentive to multiply uploads as cheap labor. Then there's the fact that in the long run (possibly not even that long by our present standards), sheer natural selection will favor philoprogenitive inclinations, until it hits the Malthusian wall.
Cheap labor towards what end? Has the motivation of future uploads been addressed by Hanson? I think the true rejection is the fact that there's an evolutionary advantage to mass replication. If there's ever a scarcity of resources, the side with there could be a war or something and the side with fewer but smarter uploads would win and take the computing power from the mass replicators.
If you were a utilitarian, then why would you want to risk creating an AGI that had the potential to be an existential risk, when you could eliminate all suffering with the advent of WBE (whole brain emulation) and hence virtual reality (or digital alteration of your source code) and hence utopia? Wouldn't you want to try to prevent AI research and just promote WBE research? Or is it that AGI is more likely to come before WBE and so we should focus our efforts on making sure that the AGI is friendly? Or maybe uploading isn't possible for technological or philosophical reasons (substrate dependence)?
Is there a link to a discussion on this that I'm missing out on?