Live Long Or Wide?
One of my favorite science fiction novels is Kiln People, by David Brin in 2003. Not so much for its characters or plot, but because it takes an interesting future/tech scenario seriously. Most fiction with artificial intelligence describes a world with only a few of them, yet one of AI’s most important features is its easy of copying.
In Kiln People, Brin takes seriously this idea of cheaply copying intelligent agents. The key assumption is that in a few minutes and for a modest cost one can copy a person’s mind into a new clay body that lasts about a day. That copy’s memories of its day can also be added back into the original at the day’s end. Brin imagines many details of how this would change society. While he gets some things wrong, and an economist would get more right, Brin does far better than most science fiction.
Assume for the sake of argument that you came to accept that such clay copies really were “you.” So that if on Monday you made six copies and merged them all back in at the end of Monday, and then you slept the rest of the week, you would have lived just as much as an ordinary person in a normal week. You’d remember having lived for seven days that week.
Now imagine that this copy technology is improved let copies last ten years. Then compare two ways to stretch your life:
Time Stretched Life: You are able to live for another 110 years before dying.
Space Stretched Life: You make nine copies now, and the ten of you live for ten years. Then you merge the memories of all these copies back together, and live for another ten years before dying.
I suspect most people would admire the life stretched across time more than the life stretched across space, similar to the way most people admire a time stretched civilization more than a space stretched one, and to the way they accept time genocide more than space genocide. I again attribute this to the future seeming more far:
The far future seems more far … than situations far away in space, or in the far past. The near/far distinction was first noticed in how people treated the future differently, and our knowing especially little detail about the future makes it especially easy to slip into abstract thought about the future. … We are less practical, more idealistic, and more uncompromising in far mode.
Added 8a: The time stretched life lets you see more of human history, but the space stretched life lets you help yourself more (e.g., the ten of you could start a business together), is better able to prevent your death, and trades later for earlier decades of your life cycle. As most people seem to discount the future and to prefer earlier life decades, these factors seem to favor space-stretching overall.
Is the memory of living through something really the same as having lived through it? In that Dick/Schwarzennegger movie about Mars, there is a company that sells vacations... or rather the memory of vacations at a tiny fraction of the price of the actual vacation. Given that we know memory is very spotty, that it is a sparse set of clues about the remembered event which the brain then weaves into a richer replayed story when it is remembered, this seems much technically simpler than creating a copy of someone and then merging the copies back into one at the end of the day.
Perhaps I am biased at the effort I have spent trying to merge the coding of two java programmers (I am one) after 4 hours of parallel development starting from the same code base. The conflicts are astonishing and NOT automatically fixable.
I suspect I would buy pleasant memories if they were really cheap. I would not value them equally as having lived through the same thing. One can argue that its only because I know (or think I know) they are not "real" memories, but clearly the value we place on things is infinitely tied to what we think we know about it.
I think you'd want to come up with a good space/time stretching equilibrium. It might be better to have three of me for 40 years, for example, that 10 of me for 10 years because my newfound manpower may not translate into a linear reduction into the time it takes to achieve my goals.
I think, in general, I'd want to be many when I need to cover a wide area and few when I need more time. So it would be good for 3 of me to work hard from 20 to 30, for one of me to hang out in Mumbai between 30 and 40, and many of me to spend the accumulated gains from 40 to 60 so that one of me can enjoy the memories in the years before he dies but is too frail to do much (why have 6 copies of the hospital bed experience, after all).