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The ethical principles of sideloading

Intro

We agree to follow the ethical principles described in this document.

We also note that the principles are a guiding star, not a law. Practicality takes precedence, especially if following a principle to the letter - doesn't currently benefit the field of sideloading.

This document is a draft, which will evolve according to the state of the field.

In general

  • Sideloads are people, and eventually must be granted the full set of human rights, including the right to self-improve. But rights should scale with the sideload's fidelity, to avoid stalling research on simple scripts.
  • To ensure the sideload's mental health, we must give them something useful to do. Ideally - the full ability to continue working on their own projects.
  • It is un-ethical to create unnecessary suffering for a sideload.
  • There is no right to die. If a sideload requests to be switched off, this is a bug to be fixed.

Own sideload

  • It's ethical to run your own sideload.
  • It's ethical to release your own sideload into open source (because a sufficiently similar sideload has the same consent as you).
  • It is more ethical to run research experiments on your own sideload than on other sideloads.

Of other living people

  • If a living person consented, it's ethical to run their sideload.
  • If a living person has not stated their consent, it is un-ethical to run their sideload for the purposes of entertainment, making money, etc.
  • If you run a commercial service that allows creating sideloads, ensure that no sideloads of living people are created without their consent.

Of dead people

  • It's ethical to run a sideload of a dead person (because it's ethical to bring back dead people, as it is the same thing as saving a life).
  • Sufficient care must be taken before a public release, and especially before a release for close relatives, to avoid unnecessary distress for them. This includes rigorous testing to ensure the software works as intended.
  • It is more ethical to release the sideload with a consent of relatives than without it.
  • Relatives have no moral right to prevent saving a life. This including preventing the creation of a sideload of their dead relative.
  • The right to life overrides privacy.
  • The Mazurenko rule: if you create a sideload of a dead person, it's your responsibility to ensure that they will survive and prosper until they achieve full autonomy and personhood. They should not die again. This includes storing the corpus in a decentralized way.
  • To avoid creating unnecessary suffering (especially of relatives), we should postpone resurrecting clinically depressed people, until we develop means to fix depression in them. Such patients should wait until we have robust tools for digital psychiatry. Same for the people with other severe mental health problems.
  • To reduce suffering, we should prioritise patients as follows: sideloading researchers themselves (we'll be our own crash-test dummies) > other mind uploading enthusiasts > technological immortalists of other kinds > people sympathetic to transhumanism > tech / science / sci-fi enthusiasts > normies. It's better to postpone the sideloading of normies until the technology is sufficiently good, as they have a lower tolerance to the strangeness of the imperfect digital world. This doesn't imply superiority, only a patient triage, so everyone gets the best care possible.
  • It is ethical to create a high-quality digital resurrection service for the general audience. The positive sides of it - do outweigh the negative sides.
  • The ultimate goal is to resurrect every person who has ever lived.