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free_agent's avatar

It seems to me that the central economic question is "Who is gonna pay for the hardware on which my afterlife clone runs?" You can say that people don't like to die, but if you look at their choices, they often aren't willing to pay much net present value to lengthen their lives. Hell, it's hard to stop people from endangering their access to a religious afterlife *even if they completely believe in it*. People who put their money into immortal electronic copies aren't going to have that money to spend on propagating their genes, and we can easily imagine natural selection working against people "investing" in electronic immortality.

And while we're at it, why would we want to duplicate humans if we want to make electronic minds as useful workers?

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Lord's avatar

What is dark energy but anti-gravity? That something isn't possible now doesn't say much about what may be desired if it was, though I think the prevalent form would be experimentation, slicing and dicing ems to figure out how they worked.

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