Re: cloning protection technology

From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Mon Aug 20 2001 - 03:29:21 MDT


On Sun, Aug 19, 2001 at 10:26:24PM -0700, Wei Dai wrote:
> On Sat, Aug 18, 2001 at 12:23:04PM +0200, Anders Sandberg wrote:
> > In what ways do twins reduce each other's economic value in a manner
> > ordinary sibling's don't? Unless you work in a field where genetics is a
> > major determinant of success (sports or modelling?) clones do not reduce
> > your value on the work market.
>
> I think it's a matter of scale. Having one or two clones of you may not
> noticeably reduce your market value, but having tens of thousands almost
> certainly will, since many of them will probably obtain similar skillsets
> as yours. Granted this is mostly a worry for celebrities, but it affects
> everyone since it creates a disincentive for people to become highly
> successful.

Huh? Have you really thought through this from an economic point of
view? Suppose somebody starts to clone a popular star - let's say Geri
Halliwell. First, how many clones are likely to be created? Given that
the individual cost of rearing a child is more than $100,000 (and
cloning even more), few people can afford having several clones. So the
only way you would get a lot of Halliwell clones is for many families to
do it, distributing the costs. The exact number who might want to do
this is uncertain, since one of the strongest driving forces for
reproductive cloning seems to be the wish to have a genetically related
child rather than a stranger, so even relatively few of the pro-cloning
families would want Halliwell clones. But let's say culture changes.
That means Geri Halliwell now has to compete with a thousand babies.
They might get into her line of business after perhaps 15 years - at
which point it is extremely unlikely that the style and culture that
made the original successful will be in place, and the original is
going to have changed to some other style. So they will be
competitors with each other, yes, but given the nature of a merket
economy that simply implies that they can earn more by doing different
things. Somehow I doubt all people with the Halliwell genome can do is
music/looking good - the clones are very likely to find a wide variety
of niches.

So if I'm very successful my genes might become widespread. Hmm, that
sounds almost like an *incentive* for becoming successful to most
people. (As for myself, I go the direct way and try to make my memes
successful - you will all end up as my mental clones! Muhahahah! ;-)=

>
> > Copying of you with your complete
> > skillset might reduce your market value, but that is not what we are
> > speaking of here, isn't it?
>
> I wasn't talking about nonconsensual copying of minds, but when that
> becomes possible we'll need some way to protect against it as well.

Sure. It is a more serious problem, not just economically but also
ethically. As Nick Szabo suggested at Extro 5, it is really one of the
core issues of posthuman freedom.

> > A simpler possibility would be to add genetic switches expressed in
> > somatic cell lines that are activated by the pecularities of nuclear
> > transfer (there has to be some re-methylation process there, I guess)
> > and then activate a suicide gene.
>
> If the cloner knew about this mechanism, he would disable the suicide gene
> prior to nuclear transfer. If he didn't know about it, he would probably
> figure it out after the first couple of cloning attempts failed. So I
> don't think this will work.

You can hide it randomly in the genome, making the cloning far more
expensive. OK, with full decompilation technology it could be done, but
then cloning will be a relativiely trivial technology anyway and you
could start designing encrypted genomes instead.

-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Anders Sandberg                                      Towards Ascension!
asa@nada.kth.se                            http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/
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