Part 3 of AI, Alignment, and Ethics. This will probably make more sense if you start with Part 1.

In parts 1 and 2 I discussed how to sensibly select an ethical system for your society, and the consequences for AIs. What about uploads? They're neither AIs, not biological humans, but somewhere in between: what concerns does this raise and how could they best be handled? An important (and sometimes underappreciated) issue here is that uploads are not aligned (to humans, or even to each other), because humans are not aligned to other humans.

One Upload, One Vote

Let us suppose that, sooner or later, we have some means of doing whole-brain uploading and emulation. Possibly the reading process is destructive, and produces about a liter of greyish-pink goo as a by-product, or possibly not. Or perhaps it's more of a simulation effect, just one based on gigabytes, terabytes, or petabytes of statistical data about an individual, rather than actually emulating every synapse and neurotransmitter flow, such that you end up with a sufficiently accurate simulation of their behavior. Bearing in mind the Bitter Lesson, this might even be based on something like a conventional transformer architecture that doesn't look at all like the inner complexities of human brain, but which has been trained to simulate it to a high fidelity (possibly pretrained for humans in general, then fine-tuned on a specific individual), perhaps even down to some correlates of detailed neural firing patterns. The technical details don't really matter much.

I am not in fact a carbon-chauvinist. These uploads are person-like, intelligent and agentic systems, they have goals, they can even talk, and, importantly, their goals and desires are exactly what you'd expect for a human being. They are a high fidelity-copy of a human, they will have all the same desires and drives as a human, and they will get upset if they're treated as slaves or second-class citizens, regardless of how much carbon there may or many not be in the computational substrate they're running on. Just like you or I would (or indeed as likely would any member of pretty-much any sapient species evolved via natural selection).

If someone knew in advance that uploading themself meant becoming a slave or a second-class citizen, they presumably wouldn't do it, perhaps short of this being the only way to cheat death. They'd also campaign, while...

AI Rights / Welfare