Kate Riley wrote:
>>A more extreme scenario you might wonder about is uploads whose creation is
>>funded by taking out a loan and renting brain hardware, and who then get
>>evicted from this hardware because they can't pay their debt.
>
>This seems to directly violate the notion of a person's supposed right to
>life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. Would such things exist within
>an uploaded society?
An uploaded society might have laws that said you could never evict a mind from a brain. In such a society fewer loans would be made and fewer uploads would be created. This might hurt such a society's economic growth relative to competitors, though perhaps not hurt it a lot.
You might ask yourself this ethical question though: is it better to let a life be created and then have to end it, or is it better to never have let that life exist at all?
Robin Hanson rhanson@gmu.edu http://hanson.gmu.edu
Asst. Prof. Economics, George Mason University
MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030
703-993-2326 FAX: 703-993-2323