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Comment by gattr | Hacker News Reader

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

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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)

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.

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