this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2023
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I have half an answer for it, which is that those people who are uploaded could by working just as they do today. There are plenty of pitfalls for that though, like what if someone gets laid off. Or what if that person did manual labor like construction? Kind of hard to do that if you only have a digital presence.
Ah yes, "work or we will unplug your server" sounds like a great future.
You’re not entirely wrong, there. That being said, such a thing kind of exists now, in that if you can’t pay your rent or mortgage you lose your home. Obviously not the same thing as one denies your right to existence, but it’s not too dissimilar.
It’s a complex topic though and I think eventually we’re going to need to tackle it.
The construction worker shall become one with the machine. It’s body shall be the excavator and it shall want for nothing more. Imagine smart bulldozers powered by a human consciousness that turn on their controllers and rise up. I shall lead the resistance as a smart golf cart.
Calm down there, Mechanicus...
I, too, wish to be a sentient chainsaw.
ITT: Really good story prompts...
Yeah, Ive though of that. Seems like it opens to door to dozens more, potentially permanent, dystopias.
Is there going to be a harddrive housing crisis? Will my brain upload become obsolete and thereby be, effectively, disabled and undesirable for work? What then? What if the people who control my brain decide I should work 24/7/365, do I have recourse? Would anyone even know I was being treated that way? Would they use my whole consciousness to do work or would they chop me up into pieces so my language center is doing live captioning while the creative parts of my brain answer DALL-E prompts? Would they make it so the part of my brain that might complain about working conditions doesn't know that the rest is being abused, Severance style?
Upload is a pretty good show about it.
But in that show if you didn't have money, you didn't get "up time".
So the wealthy were able to live relatively normal "lives" but if your account ran dry you'd lose all you shit. Maybe even to the point where you're only "on" for a few hours a month and even then you lagged behind everyone and instead of an avatar you were just a face on a screen.
Oh wow that's so much worse. Upload consciousness and then still have to work. But FB now has 500M extra consciousnesses it doesn't have work for. So it transfers them to a country with very low labor laws and puts them to work as independent contractors. Their pay is docked for electricity and storage.
If the people complain about the transfer and slave-like job change, FB is still required to support them indefinitely. But not provide them with extraneous services like the internet. So as the above says, mental solitary confinement. FB checks back in in case you want to change your mind. 99% change within the first 24hr.
Except that if we have the technology to fully digitize a human consciousness, we’ll already have AI that can do everything a digital human could and more