[ExI] Ethics of Copying Other People

[Lee Corbin]

In the thread "Human extinction" Stefano writes about
 the question of under what conditions society should
allow one person to make copies of another.

> [Lee wrote]
> 
>> You're possibly talking about a situation that would fall under
>> "protection of private property" so far as I am concerned.
>> This rule or tradition "protection of private" property is a
>> principle that about 95% of the time provides guarantees
>> that promote progress in modern societies (e.g. those
>> [later in time] following feudal Malthusian eras).
> 
> Fine. So the issue becomes: who is the proprietor of information
> pertaining to an individual?

I reckon that an individual owns all of the information pertaining
to himself or herself except that which may be necessary for 
the maintenance of a reasonable amount of safety of others.
E.g., we should allow information to be published about 
people with known sociopathic tendencies so severe that
anyone around them is at risk (clearly too rough a description
for what we still are in abysmal ignorance about).

(But after certain possible improvements in technology,
this changes. See below.)

> The individual? Should then the biographers and historians, as well as
> the possible "uploaders" o "emulators", be barred from recording and
> reconstructing it against the individual concerned's will?

I really don't see why allowing this activity would have
costs that would outweigh the benefits. Oh, sure, there
will be a few people who'll want to resurrect Hitler for the 
sole purpose of giving him a taste of his own medicine, but
I'd wager that for every one of them, ten people will want to
bring Hitler back to life (at least for a little while, until he
bored them) just to make historical and ethical inquiries
and so forth. In short, even Hitler will probably on the whole
receive beneficial runtime in this scenario.

> Or does the information belong to those who invested in its
> collection, in which case the person whose identity is
> backed-up or "redeveloped" in an Omega-like computer
> should not be able to interfere with whatever its
> owner might like to do with it.

Thanks for the superb questions, Stefano. I'm forced to really
try to think this through, and I sense that already you may
have exposed some contradictions in my views.

Let's see. Now I was sensing a few paragraphs before that
my answer may indeed depend on the nature of the technology
available to gain the information. If it's really true that no
information is really ever lost (as some physicists suppose)
then we may for the purposes of this discussion hypothesize
a machine along the lines of Arthur C. Clark's history machine
of "Childhood's End". In that case, although it would be 
revolutionary and would very , very  badly upset some 
people, privacy would be a thing of the past and we'd just
have to get used to that. Some people would probably
spend virtually all their time spying on famous people or
on their friends, bosses, neighbors, or employees, or
good looking people they just met at a party.

It would then follow that there might then exist subsequent
technology that by analyzing everything a certain person has
said and done could re-create that person. Then to stop this,
it would be necessary for the state to use force, and I don't
see why that should be allowed. (Some people have always
wanted to use force against the consequences of new
technologies that don't directly harm anyone.)

So under those circumstances, just how would we stop
historical re-creations? In fact, just how would we stop
your neighbor from making a copy of you the way you
were yesterday?

My answer is: just let 'er rip. I offend my neighbor and he
makes a duplicate of me and starts torturing me. Naturally, 
I see this happening on my history machine, and alert my
neighbors and we all make copies of him and do unto
him what he has done unto me. That should deter most
people, I think. And for the rest of us, "be nice to your
neighbors" is important to remember anyway.

Or, yes, we could outlaw severe torture or discomfort.

>> My answer, as usual, is "who pays"? Who is footing the bill?
> 
> This seems to imply that as long as no harm or cooperation is involved
> from the side of the individual concerned, I should be left free to
> backup the information defining [somebody else's] identity, and do
> whatever I like with it. In other words, if I have a button allowing
> me to "copy" the whole mankind into the RAM of a Jupiter
> computer, it is nobody's business if U decide to do it.

Yes, right. For all the ill you may do with it, there will be, I claim,
many many more cases where good will come from it.

Lee