Yeah, but future uploads shouldn't view us exactly the same way we would view the mountain people: for starters, we are able to provide food for ourselves (and indeed have done so since the dawn of time), but the mountain people can't.
Clearly what I meant with this analogy is that humans won't be able to pay our own way. Once uploads become common, and can run quickly, they would be able to do vastly more work (because they could run much more quickly than human brains). They would also need far less money (most uploads just needing to buy some cycles on future super-duper computers). In this future, upload wages could fall far below human subsistence levels while still providing a good quality of life fore the uploads. Organic humans are pretty closely analogous to mountain people in t...
In this video, long about 48:00, Eliezer talks about uploading and about how it wouldn't be murder if his meat body were anesthetized before the upload and killed without regaining consciousness.
It's arguable that it wouldn't be murder, but I'm not clear about why Eliezer would want to do it that way. I've got some guesses about why one might want to not let the meat body wake up (legal and practical complications of a double but diverging identity, the meat version feeling hopelessly envious), but I'm not sure whether either of them apply.
On the other hand, I can think of a couple of reasons for *not* eliminating the meat version-- one is that two Eliezers would presumably be better than one, though I don't have a strong intuition about the optimum number of Eliezers. The other, which I consider to be more salient, is that the meat version is a backup in case the upload isn't as good as hoped.
More generally, what would folks here consider to be good enough evidence that uploading was worth doing?