The idea of advanced adult cloning (depending on advanced nanotech and supercomputing as well as greater control of biology) understandably leaves many people feeling ambivalent if not hostile based on gut reactions and negative hypothetical scenarios. However, in time it should be welcomed for its life-saving and life-enhancing qualities. As previously mentioned, at the subatomic level at least there seems little if any continuity of physical substrate over time, especially across discontinuities of consciousness as occur during sleep (or even, arguably, shifts of attention). Therefore, advanced cloning should be considered in many ways as "continuous" with identity as a single body existing through time, at least at and near the point of copying and highly similar in relevant ways if not technically identical over longer timespans.
The foremost benefit of the ability to produce cloned copies of a person would be to serve as a fall-back in case of lethal accidents. Yet mature utilization of the technology also would reward more rational risk-taking in careers and life and reduce the damage incurred from poor decisions or risky efforts that do not succeed. Indeed, the equivalent of suicide missions could be lived out as merely strange days in a much longer lifespan with a broader scope of experience (both interpersonally from the view of others and subjectively either as gaps of experience or experiential endings minus the existential finality of historically normal death). Beyond the individual perspective, families and friends could retain loved ones over longer lifespans.
I once spoke with Eliezer Yudkowsky on the death of his younger brother Yehuda - an unmistakeably brilliant materials science student, active Republican college radio pundit and Jewish cultural leader - to what appeared to be suicide. He found it annoying that his religious family at the time were consoling one another by stating he was "in a better place." I mentioned that at least on some interpretations of physics a wide array of possibilities were realized and that Yehuda would still be alive in many of them. Eliezer replied that although that might provide some consolation in the abstract it still doesn't change the lived experience of continuing through life without his brother.
Any overpopulation issues could be worked around through policies limiting the number of clones via something like a carbon tax differentiated by levels of pollution in energy extraction (not the apparently ineffective cap and trade approach), or analoguously the waste or benefit derived from income sources (e.g. gambling and prostitution versus software development or college instruction). Preferably, the policies would be ones that did not disincentivize reviving deceased people but placed productivity demands (via rational and limited taxation, for example) on the number of coexisting clones one could produce of oneself (in the case of geniuses or popular people, others might foot the bill). Drawing again on the analogy of renewable energy incentives, we might even pay people for the excess productivity of their clone groups beyond given thresholds.
In short, I see advanced cloning as offering a potential bridge between rational interests for the self, society, and communities of affiliation. If we manage to avoid destroying ourselves first, I think such cloning will become an integral part of the future of humanity, even as we also pursue computer uploading, computer-brain interfaces and other technological advancements that will continue to transform the nature of human beings.
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