Willa's Shortform

Willa

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Shortform #111 Uploading versus Upgrading

What do you choose and why?

Does uploading necessarily mean disembodiment?

According to which software license would you as an entity be licensed as if uploaded? What does Free or Open Source Software look like when the source code is a human being?

What software license would your upgrades come with? If you default on some hypothetical hardware upgrade subscription or capital investment, do you get your old body parts back, repoed, or something else?

What political changes does human civilization need to make to properly handle the implications of uploading, or upgrading? (presupposing that there is still a human-governed civilization at such a point rather than an AI-governed civilization a la The Culture's Minds)

I strongly prefer the upgrading path & hybridity of machine parts & biology. Uploading is way scarier to me than that, but I haven't analyzed that scariness very deeply, to be honest. Still, being powered by a mini-fusion reactor, the ability to fly and survive in any environment, and brain computer interface style augmentations just do have a sexiness and great feeling to them versus the...somewhat boring feeling idea of becoming pure machine code.

1Willa4y

I think one doesn't necessarily preclude the other, with upgrading at least. I'd be okay with upgrading that had moment-to-moment differential backups being sent off elsewhere which one could be restored from in the event of death. Admittedly, that discontinuity of consciousness may actually mean death for "original" version of the self, which sucks, but at least roughly the same entity would still be around. I would want upgrades that minimize discontinuity of consciousness & experience but do allow for some way to fire off into "virtual space" and do stuff there with some portion of total self for some amount of time. And that's true re: existing requires running on some sort of physical substrate, though I'm not sure why that obviates my concern re: issues with running on other people's hardware / servers: how do the legal particularities of selfhood & existence get handled in such scenarios? Why won't copyright be the operating legal principle? What other principle governing determination of property & rules of ownership and interaction thereof would there be? My prior is that existing systems of law would be extended as much as possible to future scenarios, based on the assumption that that seems more "face validity" plausible than civilization experiencing a significant enough discontinuity to come up with an entirely new legal system to base things on. Legal technologies tend to be conserved and appended, rather than created anew.

2JBlack4y

Fair enough, it looks like the main disagreement there was just whether the word "upload" included backups. Copyright won't be the operating legal principle for all sorts of reasons. First is that copyright pertains only to "creative works" that were authored by a person. Uploaded people are very unlikely to be considered "creative works". Modifications might be, but those seem more likely to be governed by patent-like laws if anything, as processes rather than end result. Another is that copyright is fundamentally about ownership rights, and while it is possible that the future may be a dystopian hell in some ways, it won't necessarily be one in which people are legally owned by others. If your prior is a conservative extension of current law, reinstating slavery does not seem to fit that. Even if it were, I doubt that copyright law specifically would be the means by which it is enacted. Another is that copyright is primarily about publication, not use. I would expect there to be substantial legal restrictions surrounding how mind-states may be used along the same lines as existing laws about how people are permitted to interact with other people, though I suppose in some hell-world even that may be absent.

I do think there's a key difference between a full upload that more or less maintains continuity of consciousness (e.g. you don't experience anything beyond going to sleep and waking up in a different ??body??) and a backup that restores you to a point after a definite permanent break in said continuity, e.g. death or brain injury.

What is your epistemic confidence in "Copyright won't be the operating legal principle for all sorts of reasons."? I know we are both making assumptions here, how do we best test those assumptions and validate which world seems l... (read more)