[ExI] Uploading Swindle (was Re: Finally!)

[Kelly Anderson]

On Sat, May 5, 2012 at 12:03 PM, Tomasz Rola <rtomek at ceti.pl> wrote:
> On Sat, 5 May 2012, Kelly Anderson wrote:
>
>> On Fri, May 4, 2012 at 11:07 AM, Tomasz Rola <rtomek at ceti.pl> wrote:
>> > On Thu, 3 May 2012, Kelly Anderson wrote:
>> > Ho ho! When this day comes and I am still alive, I will
>> >
>> > A. be able to upload on my own terms
>>
>> So, if I understand your objection Tomasz, your real objection to
>> uploading is that you want to upload to proprietary equipment with a
>> self sufficient security system, and you feel very uncomfortable
>> uploading to the cloud... does that about sum it up?
>
> I wasn't horrified right after I have first heard about cloud and, a bit
> later, with "computer from a grid, like electricity". But I was horrified
> few minutes later, once I started playing scenarios in my head. In one
> sentence, they all ended with some form of hive. And I don't like insects
> enough to become one of them.

Every form of emergence that I'm familiar with starts with a number of
elements, each of which is similar. The ants in a colony, cells in a
body, individuals in a population... If there is an emergent "super
intelligence" that emerges from our collective efforts, then in some
sense, we will become cells, or processing nodes, or participants of
some kind in that super intelligence.

If the super intelligence is independent of us, then we'll make great
pets. So I suppose the choice might be between useful insect, or
irrelevant pet. I think I'd rather be a useful insect than a pet...
but maybe that's just me.

> I will not give my data to the cloud. Well, ok, I will. I just need to be
> bribed. How about... an hour-worth of free music from some distributor.
> And a Stone Wars haxalogy in colorful box? Um, not physically, I get a
> picture of the box in a browser and ability to view contents for about,
> say, 10000 times, free of charge. If I wanted to buy 10000 SW boxes on
> com.zonama, I would have to put almost a million out of my pocket, so this
> sounds like a real bloody bargain.

Maybe they'll activate your pleasure center a few times a day... :-)
It will be just like Christian Heaven!!! LOL

>> So it's not uploading itself that you really have the huge problem
>> with, it's the details of where the physical computing device is.
>
> This is too simplistic.

That's why I asked, because I assumed it was.

> My real objection is about physical control of
> device. Not just its location, but access and principles of its working
> (including whether it contains backdoors and bugs). Also, I object to
> people fooling with the device, possibly changing what I am going to think
> and remember.

Our uploaded memories seem highly likely to be more reliable than
those we work with today. Philip J. Corso, a highly decorated
Lieutenant Colonel in the Army. He worked at the highest levels of
government. Yet, he remembers seeing a dead alien, and shopping the
parts of a crashed UFO around to various industry scientists in the
early 1960s. Claims the reverse engineering of these artifacts
indirectly led to the development of accelerated particle beam
devices, fiber optics, lasers, integrated circuit chips and Kevlar
material.

So what is more likely, that Corso actually did these things, that he
lied about doing these things, or that his memory failed? I think I'd
go for memory failure as the most likely explanation, with lying
coming in second. Yet he is very convincing because HE really believes
it.

I want a better memory than that. We all have the illusion that our
memories are better than they actually are. It's part of how the brain
works. It's the same kind of illusion that models our entire
environment around us when we can only actually see part of it.

> Another subject is, what is going to happen with my material posessions?
> Say, if I own a car, should I stop caring about it later?

Dematerialization is the future. Of course, the future is here now in
this sense in many ways. Do I really need those four boxes of old
National Geographics in my garage if I have every National Geographic
since 1888 on my iPad? Do I need 400 LP records when I have all that
music on my MP3 player? Do I need to own a car if a robot can deliver
one to me within five minutes whenever I need to drive somewhere? If
we get good enough at creating material goods quickly from digital
specifications, we might even be able to dematerialize things and
rematerialize them when we need them. http://www.airbnb.com/ is
dematerializing hotels. Imagine if Ebay were 1000 times more efficient
than it is now. If listing, selling and shipping something required
nothing more than the thought that you wanted to do so. If buying and
getting something required nothing but a thought and a few minutes...
How many things would you really choose to own on a continuous basis?
If I could scan all my old papers and many of my old books, I would
gladly get rid of them, but doing the scanning is a relatively large
job. Took me a couple of days with a really fast scanner to do two
boxes of papers... the last time I could find the power cord for my
scanner... LOL.

> Sure, if I am
> not going back. What if I upload while sitting in a car, to a device
> laying below the driver's seat? Ok, so, maybe I should sell my posessions
> before I upload. I am sure there will be plenty of buyers, because when
> everybody uploads, someone will have to own the Earth.

Perhaps every atom that was Earth will be converted (eventually) into
computronium?

> It is not going to
> be pleasure but hard work, this owning. Hence we should not treat buyers
> as greedy lousy beasts but as heroes. Um, nope, back. There will be
> virtually no buyers at all which will drive prices down to, literally,
> bucks for a house. And even more so buyers will be greeted as heroes, who
> dispose of their money to help those in need of selling their goods.

A house will be worth a lot because you can convert a house to an
awful lot of computronium...

> The fact that nobody rises such objections (at least, I don't remember at
> the moment) only assures me there is going to be a lot of abuse happening
> around uploading.

You are probably right. I just don't see any other choice in the long term...

> For example, a well kept up lawyer approaches a not very wealthy, not too
> well educated young man with meager income and darkening economically-bad
> future (not that I am suggesting bad education and bad prospects are
> intentional). "Young man, would you like to live the rest of your days in
> cybernetic heavens? Where the music is free, you can skate all day long
> and all night long you can balance wonderful babes on top of yours..." -
> he just needs to sell whatever he still has. All DNA and stuff, too. And a
> footprint of brain. Which means, every though this brain could have, every
> invention, belongs to us. After all, who can forbid us from educating the
> footprint, give him years of voyages and reading books in virtual library?
> It belongs to us now, right? It is a bunch of mathematical expressions. We
> can do with them as we please.

Sounds like the line they give the young suicide bombers today, doesn't it?

> After uploading, however, well... We all know that maximum life span is
> below 140 years at the moment. But let's be generous, give the guy 300
> years of life. To not make things too hard for us, let's speed up his
> clock by a factor of 110000... So after about a day he clocks 300 years of
> subjective time and we are safe to plug him off. Every judge will let us
> free. Especially if we redact the papers accordingly. And there will be
> plenty of politicians eager to support us, because at one point, uploaded
> voters will outnumber meat voters - and we can easily insert proper
> decicions into statistically significant number of ghost brains.

Voting in the future is going to get tricky... :-)

> Actually, we don't need to plug the guy off literally. We just swap him
> off, like it happens in time sharing systems (Windows users, who have
> hard time knowing they have swapfile on their systems, are going to be
> sucked in dozens into this scheme). Some tasks are swapped to
> the disk so another tasks could have their turn. This is perfectly legal,
> because on papers there is a clause that his task might be interrupted for
> short time if this is demanded for correct and proper system operations
> (like, for example, dust cleaning). The maximum time he spends in the
> "off" state is not stated, however, simply because it is so hard to
> predict every random event prohibiting the system's ongoing,
> uninterrupted work.

I think there will be some kind of contract that he'll sign... and
that contract will probably have to be honored by both parties. I
don't think the contract system will go away in the future. Sadly,
there will be many robot lawyers, I'm afraid.

> We could build a bigger system, but can any judge blame us if we postpone
> this to times when our budget allows for this?

I think your right to run will be tied to some extent to who wants to
interact with you.

> I other words, I consider at least some uploading propositions very naive
> and disconnected from reality, where dog eats dog. And also, dog eats
> whoever is stupid enough to become a sausage.
>
> Uploading is not the end of the road for me. It is a bus stop. I don't
> think I can justify uploading to myself if I don't have a plan for
> downloading, even a very sketchy one.

Uploading should not be the end of the road. However, if eventually
the entire solar system is converted into computronium, there won't be
any really happy place to download to... possibly... eventually...

-Kelly