"The new feudal aristocracy would be the ones running the demons."
The question of ownership is huge and I think still underaddressed, even after some good work like the referenced Lena, or Tom Scott's "Welcome to Life: the singularity, ruined by lawyers" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFe9wiDfb0E .
I was realizing a couple of weeks ago that if you do believe all the materialistic things cstross outlines, that a solid argument can be made that it may be never rational to upload your mind, on the ground that there is simply no circumstance I can imagine where you will "own" your own substrate. Arguably, owning your computational substrate is a fundamental aspect of life that we take for granted today. (Or, if you won't consider what you have now "ownership", at least nobody else does either.)
But there is no circumstance in the forseeable future in which anyone can own their substrate. For a while I thought a rich person could do it, but then I thought about the entire supply chain involved in creating any brain scanner and subsequent computational device, and the amount of hardware left out in the real world where others can affect it, and I realized, you just can never assume that you are doing anything other than flinging yourself irrevocably into a locked box that is not under your control. Even if a rich person thinks they funded the entire project, brand new software, brand new hardware, there are thousands if not millions of points where either mistakes or deliberate sabotage for control may have been done. How can they be sure? All mechanisms can be corrupted, and the interests are certainly there to do so, massively so!
Everything people do today to control you; advertising, censorship, social pressures, everything, will only be amplified and combined with new techniques if you are running on human-comprehensible hardware that can be affected by any intelligence organization, anybody in the supply chain with an axe to grind, etc.
I seriously can not think of what kind of assurances it would take to fling yourself into that. About the best you can do is hope that the math works out that it's better to keep you happy and it's not sadists pulling your strings but at least while you are working for someone else's interests they don't inflict massive amounts of pain on you just for fun. And the edited, redacted, sanitized, loyal version of yourself that happens to survive at least enjoys their servitude.
In the 1980s and 1990s, it was easy to at least imagine that maybe you'd own your own hardware. Today we can't even keep ownership and control of our mobile phones. How do you expect to have any ownership of something that makes your cell phone look like Dr. Nim? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KABcmczPdg
So, there's my proposed answer to cstross: Some form of absolute right of ownership of computational substrate for all sentient beings, with the responsibility of providing that to others being absolute, even if that means some technology becomes impractical or infeasible, even at great cost. There's a prisoner's dilemma aspect to this; obviously everybody wants ownership of their own substate but the rewards for defecting can be enormous... at least in the short term.
The question of ownership is huge and I think still underaddressed, even after some good work like the referenced Lena, or Tom Scott's "Welcome to Life: the singularity, ruined by lawyers" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFe9wiDfb0E .
I was realizing a couple of weeks ago that if you do believe all the materialistic things cstross outlines, that a solid argument can be made that it may be never rational to upload your mind, on the ground that there is simply no circumstance I can imagine where you will "own" your own substrate. Arguably, owning your computational substrate is a fundamental aspect of life that we take for granted today. (Or, if you won't consider what you have now "ownership", at least nobody else does either.)
But there is no circumstance in the forseeable future in which anyone can own their substrate. For a while I thought a rich person could do it, but then I thought about the entire supply chain involved in creating any brain scanner and subsequent computational device, and the amount of hardware left out in the real world where others can affect it, and I realized, you just can never assume that you are doing anything other than flinging yourself irrevocably into a locked box that is not under your control. Even if a rich person thinks they funded the entire project, brand new software, brand new hardware, there are thousands if not millions of points where either mistakes or deliberate sabotage for control may have been done. How can they be sure? All mechanisms can be corrupted, and the interests are certainly there to do so, massively so!
Everything people do today to control you; advertising, censorship, social pressures, everything, will only be amplified and combined with new techniques if you are running on human-comprehensible hardware that can be affected by any intelligence organization, anybody in the supply chain with an axe to grind, etc.
I seriously can not think of what kind of assurances it would take to fling yourself into that. About the best you can do is hope that the math works out that it's better to keep you happy and it's not sadists pulling your strings but at least while you are working for someone else's interests they don't inflict massive amounts of pain on you just for fun. And the edited, redacted, sanitized, loyal version of yourself that happens to survive at least enjoys their servitude.
In the 1980s and 1990s, it was easy to at least imagine that maybe you'd own your own hardware. Today we can't even keep ownership and control of our mobile phones. How do you expect to have any ownership of something that makes your cell phone look like Dr. Nim? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KABcmczPdg
So, there's my proposed answer to cstross: Some form of absolute right of ownership of computational substrate for all sentient beings, with the responsibility of providing that to others being absolute, even if that means some technology becomes impractical or infeasible, even at great cost. There's a prisoner's dilemma aspect to this; obviously everybody wants ownership of their own substate but the rewards for defecting can be enormous... at least in the short term.