(Well ~ If there's a way to keep the duplicate/virtual minds bidirectionally in-sync for a while, then ...)
Still then: The main question remains.
Is it ethical to do STRG+X instead of STRG+C?
Ship of Theseus
I think a more interesting question is whether you're the same person when you wake up every morning. Chemicals in flux when you're awake undergo dramatic turnover and shift, sometimes without returning to the same baseline.
What about moment to moment?
I think the view of "self" is what's to blame.
So let’s say in the Ship of Theseus experiment all the boards are replaced one after another pretty quickly. I think it’s not the same ship. If it’s done over a longer time period it’s the same ship.
Similarly to your body - your cells get replaced but you maintain continuity. So nightly yea you’re the same person. But you probably aren’t the same person as you were 10 years ago. This is true in many ways, some simple examples are your tastes and preferences changing. Beliefs, etc.
> I think the view of "self" is what's to blame.
Agree completely and I think this bleeds into discussions around consciousness as well.
Here are a few more:
- Whoever wins BCI wins the evolutionary arms race. They can have an infinitely scalable workforce (slave force) to build anything conceivable and rapidly outperform the competition. (They also won't need biological humans anymore, so they can easily chemically eradicate us.)
- How does Democracy work in BCI? A lot of the things we take for granted break down and have no clear analog. Who decides the rules of the system? Who shuts down simulations? Who decides what simulations get certain stimuli (or tasks)? Benevolent God or dictator seem to be more stable configurations, and the latter is probably more efficient.
- If physics is solvable and losslessly reversible, a future entity could grab and emulate us at any point. We could be simulations of originals right now. Or in the future subjected to infinite torture and pain without any control. Pointing this out was how I learned of the similarly themed Roko's Basilisk.
I'm curious whether we'll invent AGI or BCI first. There have been more developments from the deep learning camp, but BCI seems to be gaining more interest.