In the recent (good) movie Star Trek, the heros spend several years training in the Star Fleet academy, and then spend a few days on their first real mission, which turns out to be an excellent learning experience. Should there be a sequel to this movie, the heroes would seem to start out especially well-positioned compared to most Star Fleet officers. In fact, if it were possible, Star Fleet might be tempted to fill much of their fleet with copies of these few heroes.

In a world of ems, this might well be the typical situation. To create ems trained for a new job, thousands of copies might each go through a long training period, including book learning, life-like problems, and fast-track real experience. Millions of work copies might then be made of the one copy that did best in the training competition. That copy might have experienced ten years of training (perhaps crammed into just one month of real time), get a nice long restful vacation, and then be asked to do a only one month of hard labor on useful tasks. While subjectively that one month of hard useful work would have been only a small fraction of each em’s overall pretty pleasant life, and so relatively easy to tolerate, in fact in this scenario most of the em months experienced could be of this sort of hard (but still live-worth-living) labor.

“O brave new world! That has such people in it!”