They probably shouldn't, what unique value does anyone bring? Which is also why I am not even going to entertain the idea in earnest. This is just some creative rephrasing of the countless books out about being the best performer, the rockstar, the person to aspire to be.
BORING!
The work I do is appreciated by those around me. It isn't world changing, it doesn't need to be. I am happy doing my work, other people are happy with the work I do. When I am done with work I am done with work and do the mediocore stuff that also makes me happy. When the time comes, I'll shut down and that will be enough. Thank you very much.
Before commenting you should read the article. It very explicitly makes it an economic value question. Which is the context in which I wrote my answer.
No human being would exist in the scenario described in my opinion.
The scenario pre-supposes that humans would need to contribute some kind of value in order to justify their existence. I personally doubt any human being would be able to generate enough meaningful value that would be enough to justify the operating expense of their existence. Computing resources that could be used running human.exe, would almost certainly be better used to run some other program. So in a such a world, no human brain would be booted up, it would be entirely populated by other programs that are busy contributing whatever value the mis-aligned system requires.
Once we dispense of the assumption that a human would need to justify their existence outweigh the cost, we can more easily answer the original question. Humans would clearly have some right to exist in this scenario and we just need to make sure that it extends to humans that are already dead but sufficiently scanned to be recreated.
Yep, the answer to why would anyone boot you up is because they want to be booted up in the future too. Maintaining a culture where everyone gets booted is the easiest way to do that.
Or worse... in a world of such advanced technologies, the reason for booting people up isn't going to be for technical knowledge of any sort. And 1000 years of art and music will have also gone by.
So people might be booted up as toys for children.
> Humans would clearly have some right to exist in this scenario and we just need to make sure that it extends to humans that are already dead but sufficiently scanned to be recreated.
So it sounds like we might be stuck toiling away to fund their social security for an eternity.
I read a sci-fi book about this a while back. The protagonist's wife dies of some malady and so he has her cryogenically frozen. He then wants to freeze himself and have himself thawed once her malady could be cured, but realizes no one would ever wake him as-is. So he pivots his career into interviewing pop culture folk from all over the globe and publishes the interviews.
Eventually some rich guy thaws him out so he can learn more about his interviews and he goes on from there trying to cure-and-revive his wife.
IIRC he keeps freezing and thawing himself throughout millennia... can't recall the name of it though! Arg.
Lots of funny assumption every time this comes up. You seriously think there's going to be skills that you can learn to be economically useful in a future society where you can boot up 10000x brain models at a whim? Or more importantly, a single upscaled model 10000x the size?
Nobody is going to have any practical use for your brain. The only reason you'd be brought back is if we build and maintain a society that values human life enough to breathe it back into your decrepit, worthless neurons.
There's really no reason to boot up anyone. Even look at population levels - there's marginal return for adding additonal people as is. In fact, it's probably better to boot up a robot to so some sort of work than to boot up any average person, as its needs and resources would be lower.
Another point is that even if you did want to prepare, eg by learning an old form of the likely language--you wouldn't be able to speak it, but you'd be better-equipped--you wouldn't know which one. A thousand years ago, Google suggests (ok, actually Quora, but I couldn't find better numbers) there were c.2 million speakers, out of a total population of at least 200 million - in other words, all languages with over 1 percent of the population, and possibly (taking a higher estimate) with as little as 0.5 percent of the population speaking it, criteria met (former) by Chinese, Spanish, English, Arabic, Hindi/Urdu, Bengali, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, Vietnamese, French, Portuguese, Indonesian, German, Marathi, Telugu, Turkish, Hausa, Tamil, Swahili, Nigerian Pidgin, Tagalog, Punjabi, Korean, and Javanese, and, for the latter, in addition to all of the languages of the former, Amharic, Bhojpuri, Burmese, Gujarati, Italian, Farsi, Kannada, Lingala, Malayalam, Thai and Yoruba.
You can't even rely on languages being somewhat similar (French, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian are close enough that, given the amount of change, you probably can get away with learning just one of them; if you were really reductionist you could take one Indo-European language, one Turkic language, etc). Even being maximally reductive, the number of languages you need to learn is still 9, 10 if you go by the upper estimates (the Tai-Kadai family, represented by Thai, being optional). That's a lot, especially given that this metric lumps languages as separate as English, Bengali, and Farsi together, or Hausa, Arabic, and Amharic (and Maltese, for what it's worth). And that's just to have a decent shot at understanding a thousand-year-old version of the lingua franca!
The idea of essential immortality or at least a version of you getting immortality (as far as the version that conceivably gets booted up is concerned it worked, it's the reconstructed body that came out the other end of the teleporter not the one killed and disassembled down to the atoms in the Star Trek teleporter thought experiment, also featured somewhat differently in The Prestige). Loads of people are afraid of death or think they're important/special enough that they deserve or are interesting enough to keep around forever.
I have a deep fear of death. I don't find it reassuring to think that there might be a copy of me running around. I'm not so vain to think that my consciousness is of value outside myself, I just know that it is of value to me because that's the only place I exist. It seems strictly an exercise in ego.
You can make clear before you die — e.g. in your will — that you don’t want your brain scanned like this, and certainly don’t want to pay for it. So you take the choice out of their hands.
Why should we want to pay for our brains to be scanned like this?
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BORING!
The work I do is appreciated by those around me. It isn't world changing, it doesn't need to be. I am happy doing my work, other people are happy with the work I do. When I am done with work I am done with work and do the mediocore stuff that also makes me happy. When the time comes, I'll shut down and that will be enough. Thank you very much.
If you were running a version of your dead mom, and she told you she wanted you to boot up her mom, would you?
The reason to keep someone alive is not rooted in the economic value they provide to the world (IMO).
The scenario pre-supposes that humans would need to contribute some kind of value in order to justify their existence. I personally doubt any human being would be able to generate enough meaningful value that would be enough to justify the operating expense of their existence. Computing resources that could be used running human.exe, would almost certainly be better used to run some other program. So in a such a world, no human brain would be booted up, it would be entirely populated by other programs that are busy contributing whatever value the mis-aligned system requires.
Once we dispense of the assumption that a human would need to justify their existence outweigh the cost, we can more easily answer the original question. Humans would clearly have some right to exist in this scenario and we just need to make sure that it extends to humans that are already dead but sufficiently scanned to be recreated.
So people might be booted up as toys for children.
So it sounds like we might be stuck toiling away to fund their social security for an eternity.
Eventually some rich guy thaws him out so he can learn more about his interviews and he goes on from there trying to cure-and-revive his wife.
IIRC he keeps freezing and thawing himself throughout millennia... can't recall the name of it though! Arg.
Nobody is going to have any practical use for your brain. The only reason you'd be brought back is if we build and maintain a society that values human life enough to breathe it back into your decrepit, worthless neurons.
Deleted Comment
You can't even rely on languages being somewhat similar (French, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian are close enough that, given the amount of change, you probably can get away with learning just one of them; if you were really reductionist you could take one Indo-European language, one Turkic language, etc). Even being maximally reductive, the number of languages you need to learn is still 9, 10 if you go by the upper estimates (the Tai-Kadai family, represented by Thai, being optional). That's a lot, especially given that this metric lumps languages as separate as English, Bengali, and Farsi together, or Hausa, Arabic, and Amharic (and Maltese, for what it's worth). And that's just to have a decent shot at understanding a thousand-year-old version of the lingua franca!
> Given that running a brain scan still costs money in 1000 years, why should anyone bring you back from the dead? Why should anyone boot you up?
I don't think that's really the crucial question. In my view, the crucial question is why would you want to be booted up?
I don't think that's an easy question for most people to answer when they really think about it.
As it stands now, you presumably need to make a choice to enable bringing your projected self back from the dead in the first place.
Why should we want to pay for our brains to be scanned like this?