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Comment by ant6n | Hacker News Reader

> Imagine that I’m able to create an atom-for-atom clone of myself, have the clone clean the attic, then vanish into thin air. Would that be slavery? Murder?

Your atom-for-atom clone is his own sentient, intelligent being, a human, with human rights. If you make him clean the attic once, that may not be slavery yet (depending on what threat you use to make him work for you). If you then evaporate him, it's definitely murder.

This situation has fairly obvious morality; it's not clear how this helps with thinking about AI.

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If you use any threat at all to make the clone do the work, that's irrational, because you obviously weren't truly of the opinion that one of you should do the work, or even of the opinion that the cloned one should do it. So you were fighting against yourself in your mind before you began the experiment.

If on the other hand both of you are cool with it, the evaporation isn't murder.

If you and your sentient clone somehow agree that you murdering him is "cool", doesn't make you murdering him any less of a murder. The example is rather contrived, since an atom-by-atom clone of you would have the same memory and drives as you (it probably wouldn't even be possible to identify which is the clone), so it would seem in this scenario you both appear to have a death wish. But acting on somebody else's death wish and murdering them does not make it "not murder" just because they expressed a death wish.

You're talking about law? There was that German cannibal who killed and ate somebody with consent. Wikipedia's German cannibals category tells me I mean Armin Meiwes, and he first got manslaughter, then murder on a retrial. Euthanasia laws, meanwhile, differ by country. But I thought we meant murder in the moral sense.

Death itself is deeply rooted in the mechanics of biological life that currently exists on Earth. We, rightfully so, recognize enormous value of human life, as it takes so much effort to create one. Thinking of my own death, I also see multiple layers of how I would approach it. I might have an animalistic, subconscious will to survive. I might be afraid of pain. I might be regretful of not experiencing more in life. I might be afraid for family I’d leave behind. I’m not making any definitive statements, but it feels like many of those layers are affected when bending the reality to the point of vapourizing a perfect clone.

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