Kathryn Riley wrote:
>Concerning uploaded individuals. ... would wish to retain all of its
>memories ... there would seem to be some concern about space. ... Is it
>realistic to expect resources to hold out? How many people are expected
>to ultimately be uploaded?
It's no so much the number of people that upload as the number of copies each of them will make, and then the number of other digital creatures folks will make via other means. Yes, storage resources will be limited, so non-very-rich creatures will have to not treat them as if they were free. Which means that at some point the price of storage will deter some copy from storing one more memory. Really, how could it be otherwise?
A more extreme scenario you might wonder about is uploads whose creation is funded by taking out a loan and renting brain hardware, and who then get evicted from this hardware because they can't pay their debt. (See http://hanson.gmu.edu/uploads.html)
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