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wedrifid comments on Malthusian copying: mass death of unhappy life-loving uploads - Less Wrong Discussion
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Stuart, it sounds like you think that the life of the typical animal, and of the typical human in history, were not worth living -- you'd prefer that they had never existed. Since you seem to think your own life worth living, you must see people like you as a rare exception, and may be unsure if your existence justifies all the suffering your ancestors went through to produce you. And you'd naturally be wary of a future of descendants with lives more like your ancestors' than like your own. What you'd most want from the future is to stop change enough to ensure that people very much like you continue to dominate.
If we conceive of "death" broadly, then pretty much any competitive scenario will have lots of "death", if we look at it on a large enough scale. But this hardly implies that individuals will often feel the emotional terror of an impending death - that depends far more on framing and psychology.
Something I've not been clear about (I think you might have changed your thinking about this):
Do you see your malthusian upload future as something that we should work to avoid, or work to bring about?
I notice that Robin avoided answering your question.
For what it is worth if OvercomingBias.com posts are taken literally then Hanson has declared the scenario to be desirable and so assuming rudimentary consequentialist behavior some degree of "prefer to work to bring about" is implied. I am not sure exactly how much of what he writes on OB is for provocative effect rather than sincere testimony. I am also not sure how much such advocacy is based on "sour grapes" - that is, concluding that the scenario is inevitable and then trying to convince yourself that that what you wanted all along.
Yeah, the reason I asked is that he's been evasive about it before and I wanted to try to pin down an actual answer.
If you want more precise answers you have to ask more precise questions. Whether or not I favor any particular thing depends on what alternatives it is being compared with.
Okay, compare it to life now.
That isn't a realistic choice. If you mean imagine that 1) humanity continues on as it has without ems arriving, or 2) ems arrive as I envision, then we'd be adding trillions of ems with lives worth living onto the billions of humans who would exist anyway with a similar quality of life. That sounds good to me.
Thanks, that tells me what I wanted to know.
(FWIW, I didn't mean that last one as a choice, just a comparison of two situations happening at different times, but i don't think that raelly matters)