On Tue, Aug 21, 2001 at 02:44:19PM -0700, Wei Dai wrote:
>
> 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.
But if the original is very unlikely to remain in the "baby pop" (or
whatever the style is called) style where the appearance and personality
of her was so successful (that niche is also likely to be changed; even
today's retro-70's music is not produced and based on the same kind of
people and processes it was in the 70's; hence few of the clones would
have a chance for a successful baby pop career either), then her clones
will not be more successful than other, genetically different,
contenders for the her current market niche.
> 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.
Sure, but that was not your original claim. I think this is a far better
argument against wild cloning than the competition argument.
> > 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.
Maybe. But if your argument that people don't view clones as "their own
flesh and blood" holds, and the market argument doesn't hold, then there
will be no reason for people not to be successful.
>
> > 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?
Maybe on the conference website.
> > 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?
The trick is to put it in randomly somewhere (close to other genes that
have promoters sensitive to the remethylation), so that it gets hidden
in the complexity of the genome. It is not a perfect way, but likely
very hard to fix without a careful decompilation.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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