From: Wei Dai (weidai@eskimo.com)
Date: Tue Aug 21 2001 - 15:44:19 MDT
On Mon, Aug 20, 2001 at 11:29:21AM +0200, Anders Sandberg wrote:
> 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.
Some of the 15 year old Geri Halliwell clones are bound to emulate what
the original Geri Halliwell will be doing 15 years from now rather than
what she is doing now. So they are going to be competition. Even if we
assume for the sake of argument that the clones don't directly reduce the
original's market value, the original would still like to have control
over who can clone him so that he can gift or sell his clones.
> 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! ;-)=
I don't think so. People don't think in terms of wanting to make their
genes more widespread, because our genes haven't had a chance to co-evolve
with that recent meme. Maybe they will think that way eventually if
certain other things don't happen to make genes entirely obsolete, but
right now I think if you ask most people whether they mind being
involuntarily cloned, they would say yes.
> 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.
Is his talk available online anywhere?
> 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.
I wasn't aware you could hide genes like this. How would you go about
doing it so that you can't find the genes without full decompilation?
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