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.
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 immediately, but it is a design goal, and may even be exceeded in efficiency as we get better) Power consumed by typical American household: 900kWh per month (100 years in brain-seconds) Number of humans available for uploading: 10 billion.
Over a hundred thousand years, that's a lot of terrible people, a lot of spare capacity for evil, and a high probability of everyone eventually experiencing a violent crime, like upload-torment. Changes to those numbers unfavorable to this scenario require incredible optimism about social developments, and pessimism about technical developments.
I feel like just about anyone, even without a stanford prison experiment like environment, can muster up the will to leave a lightbulb on for a while out of spite.
Arguably, once 'captured', the aggregate total time spent experiencing torture for a given future copy of you may vastly exceed the time spent on anything else.
Anyone who argues in favor of 'merciful' euthanasia for people on the way to horrific medical problems would likely argue in favor of secure deletion to avoid an eternity in hell.