Re: Uploading - It's not all about you

Peter C. McCluskey (pcm@rahul.net)
Sat, 25 Jul 1998 10:00:00 -0700

hanson@econ.berkeley.edu (Robin Hanson) writes:
>There are reasons for prejudice, and there are excuses for prejudice.
>Whether an upload is "the same person" as a human seems more an excuse.
>The reasons would more depend on concerns about uploads taking away
>human jobs, beating humans on the battlefield, being insensitive to
>an ecological collapse, etc. I'd rather address reasons than excuses
>at this stage of the game.

The desire for a good moral system will have some influence on how those reasons for prejudice are translated into actions. My gut feeling has been that the reasons for prejudice are hard enough to alter that my effort is better spent restraining the results. It would certainly be nice to advocate that people train themselves to switch ot professions X, Y, and/or Z that will still provide reasonable wages after uploads become common, but I haven't identified such professions with enough confidence to justify the effort. But now that you have provoked me into thinking about it, I see some hope that people may be influenced to increase their chances of prospering in an era of uploads by explaining the advantages of a high savings rate today.

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