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Selection for Liking Cloning

People don't like cloning very much. But that won't last long. It'll just take a few massive secret cloning programs to spread the genes of people who don't mind it that much.

Teleportation Squeamishness

Say we invent a way to teleport full information about someone's entire physical structure, and reproduce it in a box thousands of miles away. We could teleport people this way.

What do we do with the original?

Squish Them

If the original is still hanging around, we might just squish it. People would mind, but as long as we don't show it to them, they'll eventually forget about it. As long as the process is secure, it is not disadvantageous to keep getting copied & then squished. Our revulsion at the idea is perfectly understandable as a reasonable product of a world where copying wasn't possible - but as it becomes possible, there will be massive selection pressure for not minding it that much.

And we can be way more productive since transportation would be a lot better, now.

What does Star Trek Do?

it's kind of unclear. They break the person down to their full information, then reconstruct it somehow. But it's unclear whether they actually use the same molecules. But if it is down to that level, what would really be the harm in switching out a couple carbon molecules with other ones?

Just Leave the Copy and there will be two

Or, we could just leave the original & let it run around. It might cause some legal issues, but it's not much worse than twins. One of them would need to be designated the primary clone, a la John C Wright's world.

Forced Destruction

Or, the original might be destroyed in the process of getting the info, but any number of copies can be made. This would make the process more acceptable, I guess.

But in any case, once there is a machine that just makes copies of people, a greater proportion of genes will have come from the machine over time. So even if 99% of people are unwilling to use it, the 1% leftover will massively out-reproduce them & will eventually become dominant.

Preserving body integrity

In the past, our genes made it easy for us - they made people want to preserve their body, and have sex. But in the new world, preserving the body doesn't matter that much, and selection will move on to other ways. Most future people will be descended from people with weird genes & ideas, which made them do crazy stuff like find a way to have a million kids, or to spread their genes through unusual methods.

In the same way that for thousands of years, mass and weight were about the same thing for us. But when people went to space, the bond between them was broken, and it's obvious that our genes are obsolete. In the same way, the old vital goal of just preserving your body & following your heart will be replaced by much more effective mass reproduction / rational / culturally enforced reproduction. It isn't really a change - it's the same basic principle - there are more things which last longer or reproduce than things that disappear. And it's not a change for genes either - their continued existince within human society has always been dependent on their ability to make the body spread them.

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