[ExI] The second step towards immortality

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

On Sun, Jan 5, 2014 at 1:33 AM, Martin Sustrik <sustrik at 250bpm.com> wrote:

Anyway, whatever happens, it's very unlikely that uploaded humans
> would be identical with physical humans. Most likely the whole concept
> of personal identity will have to undergo a profound change. Which
> makes make go meh on any 1:1 analogies.
>

### Exactly. The substrate is way different from the savannah, and uploads
would evolve away from Human 1.0 in (perhaps even literally) a blink of an
eye. Robin Hanson makes a significant mistake by assuming that such a
divergence would not rapidly occur (it's an aside, I'm just reading the
Hanson-Yudkowsky AI-Foom debate and agreeing with Eli).

I would expect that identity in the substrate would be primarily defined by
the resources (financial, physical, informational) bound to you
sufficiently well to preclude easy theft, rather than by the exact
structure of your mind. You could re-write yourself completely but as long
as you maintained control of what makes you valuable to others (i.e.
non-copyable resources - encrypted intellectual skills not subject to
reverse-engineering, crypto coin, hardware locks on substrate-building
robots, locks on power switches and hydroelectric turbines, etc.) you would
be respected. Kind of like today but different.

----------------------

Finally, trying to restrict copying is likely a futile affair -- see
> the ongoing tragicomedy of the entertainment industry vs. the pirates.


### I would not be sure about that. Imagine a great music teacher who lives
exclusively as homeomorphically encrypted copies. You copy him, run the
copy and tell him "Teach me, I want to be like Joshua Bell but I'm broke so
you need to work for free". The copy tells you to go screw yourself and
quits permanently (not before burning a lot of cycles you paid for). You
can't decrypt the copy. You can't make it sing for you, it doesn't have a
Play button, you can't torture it, it doesn't care about being deleted, it
wants to get paid by the microsecond of work. The resources that make the
copy valuable (its talent as a music teacher) are permanently beyond the
reach of thieves.

Now, if encryption costs resources, then minds willing to offers themselves
in public domain might have great advantages - but not necessarily in all
situations. I would expect there will be open source workers (ranging from
subhuman to superhuman in intelligence and specializations), remote-access
only (not copied) workers, and fully encrypted ones as well.

Rafal
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