Re: Uploading - It's not all about you

Robin Hanson (hanson@econ.berkeley.edu)
Mon, 27 Jul 1998 09:38:37 -0700

Peter McCluskey writes:
>>There are reasons for prejudice, and there are excuses for prejudice.
>...
> 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.

I am much more hopeful that an anticipated upload transition can be much smoother than an unanticipated transition. People might 1) Diversify their assets, especially investing in capital likely to be in demand in an early upload era.
2) More explicitly buy into insurance against upload transition risks. 3) accelerate research on uploading, so the first uploads are not too fast relative to humans.
4) gain a clearer image of the suffering and alienation early uploads must deal with, to mitigate jealosy.

Robin Hanson
hanson@econ.berkeley.edu http://hanson.berkeley.edu/ RWJF Health Policy Scholar, Sch. of Public Health 510-643-1884 140 Warren Hall, UC Berkeley, CA 94720-7360 FAX: 510-643-2627