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Comment by h2odragon | Hacker News Reader

Also, what're you going to do to earn your storage space and compute cycles in this "virtual afterlife" that's assumed will exist? Especially if "uploaded people" images can be copied, there's going to be a lot of "digital people" for whom no one has any use. Talk about your exploitable underclass.

How many people who consider uploading as a desirable thing think they might end up playing an NPC in a "Grand Theft Auto" game? Over, and over, and over again...

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That's a good point. If you believe that the simulated AI from the scans (called Copies in Permutation City) is a living thing, you're bringing them into existence in a very precarious environment. If you really love yourself that much, would you trust that your Copy would be granted all the rights and dignity that you currently experience?

In the future, your boss will be uploaded and you will be running with menial tasks coming from there.

People who think that uploading is "afterlife" or retirement are badly mistaken. Pre-uploading is "prelife".

Depending on the rights those copies hold and the capabilities of the technology, couldn't they be merged to avoid unnecessarily duplication of persons?

With current trends of surveillance capitalism and nickle-and-diming for every single useful feature, I can only imagine mind-uploading getting closer to an eternal torture than a pleasant afterlife.

Some interesting resources that explore this view, which also happen to fill me with existential horror at the prospect of being uploaded (especially against my will):

Tom Scott's video "Welcome to Life: the singularity, ruined by lawyers": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFe9wiDfb0E

qntm's short story "Lena": https://qntm.org/mmacevedo

I can especially recommend "Lena". It's from the 'I have no mouth and I must scream' genre of horror.

People are already effectively playing as NPCs in popular videogames. They're called gold farmers.

If you gave me the option as I got closer to 70, that I could be uploaded, and take up zero physical space, and live forever, I would jump at the chance. I don't think it's narcissistic at all. Imagine being able to communicate with your ancestors.. the opportunities for preserving knowledge and ending physical suffering, including the impact of humans living on the planet. Maybe we all just live forever until we run out of disk space. Maybe eventually we can have a lottery/queue where people take turns getting decanted for some IRL living.

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