Who among us hasn't dreamed of committing mass murder/suicide on an industrial scale to push some commits to Github?
Death is bad because it stops your memories and values from continuing to have an impact on the world, and because it deprives other people who have invested in interacting with you of your presence. Shutting down a thousand short-lived copies on a self-contained server doesn't have those consequences. At least, that's what I believe for myself, but I'd only be deciding for myself.
Let's say that in addition to the technology described in the story, we can create a completely simulated world, with all the people in it simulated as well. You get your brain scanned an instant before you die (from a non-neurological disease), and then "boot up" the copy in the simulated world. Are "you" alive or dead? Your body is certainly dead, but your mind goes on, presumably with the ability to have the same (albeit simulated) experiences, thoughts, and emotions your old body could. Get enough people to do this, and over time your simulated world could be populated entirely by people whose bodies have died, with no "computer AIs" in there at all. Eventually this simulated world maybe even has more people in it than the physical world. Is this simulated world less of a world than the physical one? Are the people in it any less alive than those in the physical world?
Let's dispense with the simulated world, and say we also have the technology to clone (and arbitrarily age) human bodies, and the ability to "write" a brain copy into a clone (obliterating anything that might originally have been there, though with clones we expect them to be blank slates). You go to sleep, they make a copy, copy it into your clone, and then wake you both up simultaneously. Which is "you"?
How about at the instant they wake up the clone, they destroy your "original" body. Did "you" die? Is the clone you, or not-you? Should the you that remains have the same rights and responsibilities as the old you? I would hope so; I would think that this might become a common way to extend your life if we somehow find that cloning and brain-copying is easier than curing all terminal disease or reversing the aging process.
Think about Star-Trek-style transporters, which -- if you dig into the science of the sci-fi -- must destroy your body (after recording the quantum state of every particle in it), and then recreate it at the destination. Is the transported person "you"? Star Trek seems to think so. How is that materially different from scanning your brain and constructing an identical brain from that scan, and putting it in an identical (cloned) body?
While I'm thinking about Star Trek, the last few episodes of season one of Star Trek Picard deal with the idea of transferring your "consciousness" to an android body before/as you die. They clearly seem to still believe that the "you"-ness of themselves will survive after the transfer. At the same time, there is also the question of death being possibly an essential part of the human condition; that is, can you really consider yourself human if you are immortal in an android body? (A TNG episode also dealt with consciousness transfer, and also the added issue of commandeering Data's body for the purpose, without his consent.)
One more Star Trek: in a TNG episode we find that, some years prior, a transporter accident had created a duplicate of Riker and left him on a planet that became inaccessible for years afterward, until a transport window re-opened. Riker went on with his life off the planet, earning promotions, later becoming first officer of the Enterprise, while another Riker managed to survive as the sole occupant of a deteriorating outpost on the planet. After the Riker on the planet is found, obviously we're going to think of the Riker that we've known and followed for several years of TV-show-time as the "real" Riker, and the one on the planet as the "copy". But in (TV) reality there is no way to distinguish them (as they explain in the episode); neither Riker is any more "original" than the other. One of them just got unluckily stuck on a planet, alone, for many years, while the other didn't.
Going back to simulated worlds for a second, if we get to the point where we can prove that it's possible to create simulated worlds with the ability to fool a human into believing the simulation is real, then it becomes vastly more probable that our reality actually is a simulated world than a physical one. If we somehow were to learn that is true, would we suddenly believe that we aren't truly alive or that our lives are pointless?
These are some (IMO) pretty deep philosophical questions about the nature of consciousness and reality, and people will certainly differ in their feelings and conclusions about this. For my part, every instance above where there's a "copy" involved, I see that "copy" as no less "you" than the original.
Asking if it's "still you" is pretty similar to asking if you're the same person you were 20 years ago. For answering basic questions like "is it okay to kill you?" the answer is the same 20 years ago and now: of course not!
I do value myself and my experience more than a rat's, and if presented with the choice of the torture of hundred rats or me, I'll chose for them to be tortured. If we go to the trillions of rats I might very well chose for myself to be tortured instead as I do value their experience just significantly less.
I also wouldn't be happy if everything is running off rats' brains who are experiencing displeasure but will be fine with sacrificing some number of rats for technological progress which will improve more people's lives in the long run. I imagine whatever I've said on the topic before is consistent with the above.
And then it gets worse: in certain variations of this logic, then you could buy a lottery ticket, and do certain copying setups based on the result to increase your subjective experience of winning the lottery. See https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/y7jZ9BLEeuNTzgAE5/the-anthro.... I wonder whether I should take that as an obvious contradiction or if maybe the universe works in an alien enough way for that to be valid.
You'll continue as is, there's just another you there and he will think he's the source initially, as that was the source mind-state being copied. Fortunately the copying-machine color-coded the source headband red and the copy headband blue, which clears the confusion for the copy.
At this point you will start diverge obviously, and you must be considered two different sentient beings that cannot ethically be terminated. It's just as ethically wrong to terminate the copy as the souce at this point, you are identical in matter, but two lights are on, twice the capability for emotion.
This also means that mind-uploading (moving) from one medium (meat) to another (silicon?) needs to be designed as a continuous-journey as experienced from the source-perception if it needs to become commercially viable (or bet on people not thinking about this hard enough, because the copy surviving wouldn't mind) without just being a COPY A TO B, DELETE A experience for the source, which would be like death.
When I wake up in a simworld and asked to finally refactor my side project so it can connect to a postgres database, not only do I know that it will be the last thing that this one local instantiation experiences, but that the local instantiation will also get no benefit out of it!
If I get blackout drunk with my friends in meatspace, we might have some fun stories to share in the morning, and our bond will be stronger. If I push some code as a copy, there's no benefit for me at all. In fact, there's not much incentive for me to promise my creator that I'll get it done, then spend the rest of my subjective experience trying to instantiate some beer and masturbating.
If you psyche yourself into the right mood, knowing that the only remaining thing of consequence to do with your time is your task might be exciting. I imagine there's some inkling of truth in https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/dream. You could also make it so all of your upload-selves have their mental states modified to be more focused.
It would change everything about your personality, even as the original and surviving copy.
Most people define identity in part by continuity of experience, which is something that wouldn't be in common with the original, but I think this is just superstition. It's easy to imagine setups that preserve continuity that come out with identical results to setups that fail to preserve continuity (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26234052), which makes me suspicious of it being valuable. I think continuity of experience is only an instrumental value crafted by evolution to help us stay alive in a world that didn't have copying. I think if humans evolved in a world where we could make disposable copies of ourselves, we wouldn't instinctively value continuity of experience -- we would instead instinctively value preserving the original and ensuring a line of succession for a copy to take the place of the original if something happened to the original -- and that would make us more effective in our pursuits in a world with copying.
Now if I was the upload, and I learned that my original had died (or significantly drifted in values away from myself) and none of my other copies were in position to take over the place in the world of my original, then I would worry about my mortality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiln_People
The premise is quite similar to "uploads" except the device is a "golem scanner", which copies your mind into a temporary, disposable body. Different "grades" of body can be purpose made for different kinds of tasks (thinking, menial labour etc).
The part that resonates with your comment is around the motivation of golems, who are independently conscious and have their own goals.
In the novel, some people can't make useful golems, because their copies of themselves don't do what they want. There's an interesting analogy with self control; that is about doing things that suck now, to benefit your future self. This is similar, but your other self exists concurrently!
Key to the plot though is the "merge" step; you can take the head of an expiring golem, scan it, and merge it's experiences with your own. This provides some continuity and meaning to anchor the golem's life.
Like another commentor pointed out, I'd see my experience as a memory that would be lost outside the manifestation of my work. It would be nice to have my memories live on in my original being, but not required.
This concept of duplicated existence is also explored in the early 2000s children's show Chaotic (although the memories of one's virtual self do get merged with the original in the show): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaotic_(TV_series)
No, but that's not what's happening in this thought experiment. In this thought experiment, the lives of independent people are being ended. The two important arguments here are that they're independent (I'd argue that for their creative output to be useful, or for the simulation to be considered accurate, they must be independent from each other and from the original biological human) and that they are people (that argument might face more resistant, but in precisely the same way that arguments about the equality of biological humans have historically faced resistance).
Now imagine that because there's too many copies, there's too many unique memories, and before the merger, the copy has its memory wound back to how it was at the scan, not too different than if the copy got blackout drunk.
Now because the original already has those memories, there's no real difference between the original and the merged result. Is there any point in actually doing the merge then instead of dropping the copy? I'm convinced that actually bothering with that final merge step is just superstitious fluff.
Sure, but that's an easy thing to be convinced of when you know you're not a copy with an upcoming expiration date!