We could discover teleportation tomorrow morning and it would be twenty years before teleporters were common-place. Everything takes time to be fully realized.
If you want to know what the near future holds look at what was discovered thirty years ago.
I can appreciate this example, though in the specific context of teleportation, there'll probably be a few decades tacked on to resolve the ethical dilemmas arising from the question of whether or not the person arriving out of the other end is in fact the same person.
(I'm of the position that it doesn't matter, but still... anyway, this entire thought was just a tangent off an example)
Admittedly, the closes to teleportation I've ever felt was my first trip on a cruise ship. I went to sleep in one city, and when I opened my eyes I was suddenly in a city hundred miles away. It was magic. I also still felt like myself.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1189358...
Which tells us that sentient consciousness and identity is mostly about the continuity of a signal across only some cells (nerves), and mostly rides on top of standing waves supported by those special cellular processes, at frequencies of oscillation faster than the underlying polarized/ionic chemical processes.
Then your copy claiming your job, your house, your wife and your children. Just as you would do.
Also if the transport process takes 20 lightyears, when do you send the ACQ? Will your original walk around for 20 years and then have an automated kill switch?
This sounds like a great scenario to me. I'm sure I would get along just fine with a duplicate of myself, and we could live together and get a lot more done. It sure would help a lot with avoiding burnout at work: we could take turns going to work, me one month and him the next month for instance. But two of us sharing one wife might be a bit much for her, so it'd be a lot better if we brought a second woman into the mix and lived as a polyamorous foursome (though this might be easier if we could create a teleportation clone of the wife too). It'd also be great having a double to help me on house projects, hobby projects, working on a side business, etc. And you mentioned kids: having an extra adult around the house to deal with them can only be a help, and since it's actually another me and not some other person, we're guaranteed to get along, have the same views on parenting, etc.
Honestly, I don't see any downside to this situation at all.
But I am 90% certain that if my spouse had a duplicate, they would be yelling at each other all the time.
It would be interesting to correlate answers to the question "If you had an exact duplicate, with the same body as you, the same thoughts as you, and the same memories as you up until yesterday, how would you get along?" with various aspects of psychology.
Why would your spouse be jealous of your clone? She'd now have two of you, so she's more likely to get attention when she wants it.
“Oh yes,” said Frankie, “but we’d have to get it out first. It’s got to be prepared.” “Treated,” said Benjy. “Diced.”
“It could always be replaced,” said Benjy reasonably, “if you think it’s important.”
“Yes, an electronic brain,” said Frankie, “a simple one would suffice.”
“A simple one!” wailed Arthur.
“Yeah,” said Zaphod with a sudden evil grin, “you’d just have to program it to say What? and I don’t understand and Where’s the tea? Who’d know the difference?”
“I’d notice the difference,” said Arthur.
“No, you wouldn’t,” said Frankie mouse, “you’d be programmed not to.”
- Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Not actually about teleportation, but still apropos IMHO.
Who knows what will wake up from that?
It presents this exact same dilemma. Up until that point I never really considered the potential ethical ramifications of teleportation.
I mean, cloning things has its advantages too. Could be a good idea for some people to deliberate screw up the process and drastically cut down on their daily workload. Or perhaps as a way for the less ethical to not kill or work alongside their accidental copies, but ship 'em off to join the army or something.
Teleportation going wrong can be just as exciting as prospect as it working out fine. Cloning has a lot of useful applications as well.
At what point do we start being afraid to fall asleep?
There's a pun in there.
The first interval seems frozen, but I think this is Parkinson's law at work. Today's scientists and engineers have the best technology in History, and they're pursuing the boldest endeavors by that very fact.
They are a barrier to entry, and they are a measure to ensure safety of new cures. It's a tough balance.
It seems to me that the safety aspect is currently very strong, on the expense of long time-to-market and high barrier of entry to market.
That would not mean staying where we are, it would mean starting to slowly go backwards in the tools available for health care (because e.g. some antibiotics are slowly becoming inefficient and new ones should be developed - and currently the world is not doing enough of that.)
See e.g. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2095020/
http://healthland.time.com/2012/09/27/how-to-survive-a-plagu...
https://www.opendemocracy.net/transformation/ray-filar/silen...