From: Phil Osborn (philosborn@altavista.com)
Date: Sat Mar 02 2002 - 16:21:21 MST
With limited time just now - introducing a few related and non-related addendum:
My original piece on this mentioned but failed to emphasize the importance re uploading and related technologies. The "rights" of lower animals and infants or other humans of limited or diminished capacity obviously has implications with respect to any discussion of the rights of uploads, including their temporary clones or agents. Uploads will be much less similar in capacity than biological humans today. The more processing power and memory you can afford, the more intelligent you become, ceteris parabus. Imagine the Bill Gates of uploads vs. ghetto teenager Bob.
Even at the same or similar technology level, where MIPs and GigaRAM is a commodity on the net, some uploads will be VERY powerful and virtually invulnerable, with stakes in every pie, and some will diminish to zero, potentially. I.e., DEATH!
But suppose you spin off a temporary clone upload - or perhaps a non-conscious agent that is convinced it is the original??
Perhaps we can just kick back on the assumption that the SIs we hopefully will become will solve this trivial problem for us. It might be better to at least try to make sense of it now.
***** ON RIGHTS IN GENERAL *****
Sustainable social systems manage to maintain an overall level of positive justice. People more often than not get what they deserve. When social systems degenerate into kleptocracies or class parasitism, then productivity diminishes with incentive to produce, and there is a downward spiral.
Valid "rights" are based on justice. You can claim a property "right" - that you can ethically forbid anyone else using something or preventing you from using it - when the existence or value of that thing resulted from your actions in creating it, or trading something for it that you had a valid claim to. You can't just arbitrarily claim things you had no role in creating, like the great view out to the horizon, just because you enjoy them and are using them. The principle of justice gets lost in that case, and if you tried to make a general principle out of your claim, then anyone could claim virtually anything and the end result would be the complete loss of any use to the concept.
************* SPAMMING ALIENS *****************
So imagine that the real answer to the Fermi paradox is that they ARE out there - all of them - but the entire physical universe has been claimed as property by various SIs long, long ago. Our little corner of it just happens to be lieing fallow because of some property dispute - over Galactic distances, these things take time to resolve.
So then we pop out of nowhere and disrupt the whole Galactic communications locally with I Love Lucy rebroadcasts.... What can we expect their response to be???
*******
Then there's the MacDonald's St Pat's promo, with the Unicorn song - and people sighing in anger over the little girl that was kidnapped and killed locally - how many little girls did GOD KILL with Noahs flood???
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