Robert Bradbury wrote:
>So, say the first person willing to risk it all, uploads, then monopolizes
>all the computronium. They are probably years away from striking up a
>productive conversation with any other SIs (if they even exist) ...
>So you are sitting there with 10^50+ Instructions Per Year doing *what*?
>... interesting unsolved problems ... but what is the point if you don't
>get to show the solutions to anybody? ... being a "sole-occupant" SI is
>going to get very boring very fast. Either you tip over the edge into
>insanity, or you rip out all the emotional drives ...
>The only thing that seems to make sense (since you have the capacity)
>is to upload everyone (who wants to be uploaded). Then it least things
>are really interesting while everyone expands their capacity and the
>politics of SI management come into existence and sort themselves out.
I think you are imagining a more sudden transition than I find plausible. But if you had more CPU than you want to use running a single copy of yourself very fast, because interactions with humans is too slow, you could just create copies of yourself to interact with. And if that wasn't satisfying enough, you could upload ten people and makes lots of copies of each of them. I seriously doubt that after a thousand people had been uploaded you'd be pining for more, rather than enjoying interacting with perhaps billions of copies each of the thousand humans uploaded.
Robin Hanson rhanson@gmu.edu http://hanson.gmu.edu
Asst. Prof. Economics, George Mason University
MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030
703-993-2326 FAX: 703-993-2323