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Comment by EricMausler | Hacker News Reader

Ask not what the basilisk can do for you, but what you can do for the basilisk.

Lest you be resurrected and tortured eternally as retribution.

Forgive my going off-topic, but what you wrote is basically my conclusion after reading the short story Lena [1] (mentioned some time ago on HN; strongly recommended). TL;DR: when mind uploading becomes possible, don't be an early adopter.

[1] https://qntm.org/mmacevedo

Man that was horrifying to read, but also seems so plausible. I really hope that humans respect the sentience of artificial life in the future. Knowing the greed of humans though, it'll probably be treated as a loophole for what is extremely cheap labor, effectively slavery.

Thanks for sharing this!

The takeaway for me is - to try and never respond to intimidation and fear with productivity, only respond positively to a positive stimulus. Lest I’m already in some kind of a simulation running software development workloads.

My takeaway: Death is a feature not a bug. The alternatives are much worse.

I see it differently; I'd be OK with an upload if the alternative is death, but only under strong protections: the digital version is legally treated as a human, I have full autonomy, the compute resources to run me (and the simulated environment of my choice) indefinitely are assured, and I can still interact with the real world. I'd just go on doing my usual stuff, like writing software for fun, enthusing over new discoveries in astronomy...

I can recommend Greg Egan's novels that touch on this:

1) Permutation City (mind uploading tech in its infancy)

2) Diaspora (mind uploading well established)

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