On Disowning Descendants
Parents sometimes disown their children, on the grounds that those children have betrayed key parental values. And if parents have the sort of values that kids could deeply betray, then it does make sense for parents to watch out for such betrayal, ready to go to extremes like disowning in response.
But surely parents who feel inclined to disown their kids should be encouraged to study their kids carefully before making such a choice. For example, parents considering whether to disown their child for refusing to fight a war for their nation, or for working for a cigarette manufacturer, should wonder to what extend national patriotism or anti-smoking really are core values, as opposed to being mere revisable opinions they collected at one point in support of other more-core values. Such parents would be wise to study the lives and opinions of their children in some detail before choosing to disown them.
I’d like people to think similarly about my attempts to analyze likely futures. The lives of our descendants in the next great era after this our industry era may be as different from ours’ as ours’ are from farmers’, or farmers’ are from foragers’. When they have lived as neighbors, foragers have often strongly criticized farmer culture, as farmers have often strongly criticized industry culture. Surely many have been tempted to disown any descendants who adopted such despised new ways. And while such disowning might hold them true to core values, if asked we would advise them to consider the lives and views of such descendants carefully, in some detail, before choosing to disown.
Similarly, many who live industry era lives and share industry era values, may be disturbed to see forecasts of descendants with life styles that appear to reject many values they hold dear. Such people may be tempted to reject such outcomes, and to fight to prevent them, perhaps preferring a continuation of our industry era to the arrival of such a very different era, even if that era would contain far more creatures who consider their lives worth living, and be far better able to prevent the extinction of Earth civilization. And such people may be correct that such a rejection and battle holds them true to their core values.
But I advise such people to first try hard to see this new era in some detail from the point of view of its typical residents. See what they enjoy and what fills them with pride, and listen to their criticisms of your era and values. I hope that my future analysis can assist such soul-searching examination. If after studying such detail, you still feel compelled to disown your likely descendants, I cannot confidently say you are wrong. My job, first and foremost, is to help you see them clearly.
"More clock cycles would make an EM faster, maybe cleverer, but not wiser."
If you can buy more clock cycles you can also buy more memory. Combine these things and you have a mind that keep tracks of many more details, processes them faster and recognizes relations between things more quickly. If that does not increase wisdom then nothing does. Plus, such an EM will do ordinary tasks much quicker, that alone is enough to start a snowball of accumulation of currency followed by the purchase of more clock cycles and memory followed by even faster accumulation of currency followed by the purchase of even more clock cycles and memory and so on... Just look how comparable small differences in effort and natural ability, aided by luck, already produce the difference between wage slaves and billionaires today, that's nothing compared to what would happen if you could vastly improve your mind with money. Yes, I know that's hard to imagine but it was also hard to imagine for a cave man that someday people would gas millions of women and children in the span of a few years and that the richest men would own many thousands of times more than the average man, yet these things happened. Robin asks us to not close our mind for the possibilities of the future, I think it's only fair if that includes the possible horrors of the future if we, for some stupid reason, put aside all our ethics and human rights, but choose to stick with an obsolete economical system.
More clock cycles would make an EM faster, maybe cleverer, but not wiser. A fool who can put the rest of the world on slo-mo (for a billion dollars per second) is still a fool. Living a thousand years, murdering everyone who points and says "You're a fool!" just makes 'em a fool with enemies who are smart enough to plan quietly.
In more technical terms, mind emulation doesn't change the way comparative advantage works.
In a world of EMs, when you need a plumber, you look up the Greatest Plumber Who Has Ever Lived, who takes a fraction of a second (from the mortal perspective) to glance at the situation before referring you to the God-King of the specific sort of plumbing problem you have. Every sensible child dreams of growing up to be the digitized god of some yet-undiscovered professional specialty.