<story><title>Crimes against transhumanity</title><url>http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2022/07/crimes-against-transhumanity.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>benlivengood</author><text>There will at least have to be a law restricting the duplication or creation of persons; otherwise the dictator only needs to copy themselves &amp;gt;N times where world population is N and vote themselves into the top leadership position(s).  It would be a race to the bottom cloning people, consuming all available compute resources, just to maintain status quo of political power.  And it will be the wealthy&amp;#x2F;powerful who can afford the resources for mass self-duplication.&lt;p&gt;And then the question of personhood itself; someone is going to try uplifting animals (or raw creation of new beings) and we&amp;#x27;ll need a rigorous threshold for the properties an intelligence must have for personhood, and this is also vulnerable to the mass-cloning takeover of democracy because the simplest artificial person is likely much less resource intensive than a human, so they will quickly outnumber everyone else and who knows what their values would be in a democracy?</text></item><item><author>stereolambda</author><text>&amp;gt; Here&amp;#x27;s the thing: our current prevailing political philosophy of human rights and constitutional democracy is invalidated if we have mind uploading&amp;#x2F;replication or super-human intelligence.&lt;p&gt;Don&amp;#x27;t agree with this specific point. One of the most common anti-democratic arguments (?) is that people are inherently unequal, because of differences in physical and cognitive capacity. But this of course misses that declaration of all people being equal is &lt;i&gt;performative&lt;/i&gt;. I don&amp;#x27;t think we actually care if it&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;naturally&amp;quot; true, we - citizens - don&amp;#x27;t want to be dominated, so we will &lt;i&gt;make&lt;/i&gt; everyone equal by law and politics. Democratic politics is just arguing the specifics, in what areas, to what extent etc.&lt;p&gt;So this is a rational pact. Trying to break it just means there will be someone stronger than you out to dominate you, and you&amp;#x27;ll be in a suboptimal position to resist, because you alienated and weakened your potential allies. Look up Republicanism for a related line of thinking.&lt;p&gt;In my opinion an artificial person automatically gets all the rights (they are bound to personhood and reciprocity and not biology). But I have no doubt there will be much lawlessness about this and perhaps an American Civil War-like event down the line.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jobigoud</author><text>&amp;gt; someone is going to try uplifting animals (or raw creation of new beings) and we&amp;#x27;ll need a rigorous threshold for the properties an intelligence must have for personhood&lt;p&gt;The same question can be posed right now for humans that fell below the threshold due to brain damage or other conditions and display less self-awareness than extant, non-uplifted animals. Yet these humans in vegetative state do have personhood rights, they are not the property of someone else, it&amp;#x27;s illegal to steal their body parts, can&amp;#x27;t be terminated, etc. whereas the same cannot be said of many animals.&lt;p&gt;We currently don&amp;#x27;t have a threshold, not even a fuzzy one, it&amp;#x27;s completely arbitrary and based on being human or not. De-extinction of Neanderthal could also cause the same conundrum.</text></comment>
<story><title>Crimes against transhumanity</title><url>http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2022/07/crimes-against-transhumanity.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>benlivengood</author><text>There will at least have to be a law restricting the duplication or creation of persons; otherwise the dictator only needs to copy themselves &amp;gt;N times where world population is N and vote themselves into the top leadership position(s).  It would be a race to the bottom cloning people, consuming all available compute resources, just to maintain status quo of political power.  And it will be the wealthy&amp;#x2F;powerful who can afford the resources for mass self-duplication.&lt;p&gt;And then the question of personhood itself; someone is going to try uplifting animals (or raw creation of new beings) and we&amp;#x27;ll need a rigorous threshold for the properties an intelligence must have for personhood, and this is also vulnerable to the mass-cloning takeover of democracy because the simplest artificial person is likely much less resource intensive than a human, so they will quickly outnumber everyone else and who knows what their values would be in a democracy?</text></item><item><author>stereolambda</author><text>&amp;gt; Here&amp;#x27;s the thing: our current prevailing political philosophy of human rights and constitutional democracy is invalidated if we have mind uploading&amp;#x2F;replication or super-human intelligence.&lt;p&gt;Don&amp;#x27;t agree with this specific point. One of the most common anti-democratic arguments (?) is that people are inherently unequal, because of differences in physical and cognitive capacity. But this of course misses that declaration of all people being equal is &lt;i&gt;performative&lt;/i&gt;. I don&amp;#x27;t think we actually care if it&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;naturally&amp;quot; true, we - citizens - don&amp;#x27;t want to be dominated, so we will &lt;i&gt;make&lt;/i&gt; everyone equal by law and politics. Democratic politics is just arguing the specifics, in what areas, to what extent etc.&lt;p&gt;So this is a rational pact. Trying to break it just means there will be someone stronger than you out to dominate you, and you&amp;#x27;ll be in a suboptimal position to resist, because you alienated and weakened your potential allies. Look up Republicanism for a related line of thinking.&lt;p&gt;In my opinion an artificial person automatically gets all the rights (they are bound to personhood and reciprocity and not biology). But I have no doubt there will be much lawlessness about this and perhaps an American Civil War-like event down the line.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cwkoss</author><text>Sybil attacking democracy with digital personhood is a super cool idea.  Would be a great premise for a story.</text></comment>