[extropy-chat] Are ancestor simulations immoral? (An Attempted Survey)

[Eliezer S. Yudkowsky]

Lee Corbin wrote:
> 
> It seems that if I were get a software program that created
> and destroyed a sentient every microsecond, then after about
> a minute you would consider me the greatest mass-murderer of
> all time. Is that true?

Stalin may have done worse.

> You should maybe think of what's bugging you this way: what
> are the odds that if you grant someone freedom they'll
> immediately conjure up a hell and conjure up millions of
> sophonts to agonize in it?

As Webb_S once said upon this very mailing list:  "There are always at 
least a few people who are, by any arbitrary definition of the term, 'no 
damn good'."

-- 
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky                          http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence