There will at least have to be a law restricting the duplication or creation of persons; otherwise the dictator only needs to copy themselves >N times where world population is N and vote themselves into the top leadership position(s). It would be a race to the bottom cloning people, consuming all available compute resources, just to maintain status quo of political power. And it will be the wealthy/powerful who can afford the resources for mass self-duplication.
And then the question of personhood itself; someone is going to try uplifting animals (or raw creation of new beings) and we'll need a rigorous threshold for the properties an intelligence must have for personhood, and this is also vulnerable to the mass-cloning takeover of democracy because the simplest artificial person is likely much less resource intensive than a human, so they will quickly outnumber everyone else and who knows what their values would be in a democracy?
> someone is going to try uplifting animals (or raw creation of new beings) and we'll need a rigorous threshold for the properties an intelligence must have for personhood
The same question can be posed right now for humans that fell below the threshold due to brain damage or other conditions and display less self-awareness than extant, non-uplifted animals. Yet these humans in vegetative state do have personhood rights, they are not the property of someone else, it's illegal to steal their body parts, can't be terminated, etc. whereas the same cannot be said of many animals.
We currently don't have a threshold, not even a fuzzy one, it's completely arbitrary and based on being human or not. De-extinction of Neanderthal could also cause the same conundrum.
Well, democracy isn't only numerical advantage, it's also debating procedure and electoral system. If you just duplicate yourself, I think there are many questions about whether you really want it and your identity before just using it for political takeovers.
Historically an argument for narrow suffrage (e.g. only for landholders) was that economically dependent people are also politically dependent on magnates. These limitations did exist, though of course they're very corrosive to non-political rights as well. One can also try to make people economically independent, like it was done in ancient Athens by paying you to participate in the assembly and courts. I'm not arguing for anything in particular, just pointing out that it's a class of problems that had already existed in discourse in some way.
but this premise has an analogue - by out-breeding the "undesirables", you can obtain "democratic" power over another group. It is the argument that is used to take children away from parents of various indigenous races and "diluting" their race, or as an argument against immigrants ("they will out-breed us and then out vote us, if we let them in!").
I don't buy that a sybil attack is a real threat, as long as duplication procedure is also available to others, not just a select few. But if such a procedure is only available to a select few, it implies that they already have power, and so such a sybil attack doesn't seem like it's worth it, but instead would just use that power directly!
The obvious solution is to make cloning split the weight of the vote. People at year 0 are equal, cloning yourself (or even having kids) you split your votes and when you die your descendants inherit your share.
This kind of approach favors the weirdos who want to live forever, never reproduce, and be king of the whole universe. They only have to wait log_R(N) generations where R is the average reproduction rate and N is the current number of people.
I think the only realistic solution is maximizing average expected utility (which still has some weird edge-cases like utility monster) or maximizing the minimum expected utility of any person (drag everyone up to some minimum goodness, once they exist), which doesn't get humanity as much overall utility in the long run but avoids so many bad edge-cases that it may be worth it.
> They only have to wait log_R(N) generations where R is the average reproduction rate and N is the current number of people.
I don't think so? The wannabe dictator only gets voting power from his dying ancestors, they can never get more voting power than all their ancestors had together, no matter how much they wait. And even that edge case would only happen if all their ancestors died and had no other living descendants.
Thanks, good point; But a 7.7B^-1 share of the universe is still an incredible amount of power in the long run, and I think serves as a bit of a perverse incentive. Similar to trying to hold Bitcoin for decades.
> It would be a race to the bottom cloning people, consuming all available compute resources, just to maintain status quo of political power.
At least natural humans are rate-limited by gestation periods, but this isn't that far off from how some religious groups view their role in the world.
And then the question of personhood itself; someone is going to try uplifting animals (or raw creation of new beings) and we'll need a rigorous threshold for the properties an intelligence must have for personhood, and this is also vulnerable to the mass-cloning takeover of democracy because the simplest artificial person is likely much less resource intensive than a human, so they will quickly outnumber everyone else and who knows what their values would be in a democracy?