> "You’ll find people who can wax rhapsodic about the singularity and how everything is going to change with AGI. But if I just look at it and say, if 10 years from now, we have ‘universal remote employees’ that are artificial general intelligences, run on clouds, and people can just dial up and say, ‘I want five Franks today and 10 Amys, and we’re going to deploy them on these jobs,’ and you could just spin up like you can cloud-access computing resources, if you could cloud-access essentially artificial human resources for things like that—that’s the most prosaic, mundane, most banal use of something like this."
"Lena" is a bit of different case because it's not AGI. Probably ripe for the "forced prison labor" suggested by your sibling as the moral cop-out. Imagine being sentenced to being a cloud VM image!
A brain dump has a history, and we ascribe meaning to the past. As mentioned the thread here has mentioned forced prison labor as a form of socially acceptable slavery, and society could convince itself that a given brain dump deserves its fate, even that it is a form of atonement.
Artifical life on the other hand is presumably "pure at birth".
Of course it's not that easy. You could discuss whether individual instances have unique sets of human rights, and value potential futures over pasts.
What happens when we digitize ourselves and can run said snapshot image on "computer time"? We can barely cope with legal issues in the digital age now.
I think there’s broad consensus that slavery only applies to human labor. Even within that spectrum people avoid the term (see forced prison labor). We also don’t use it for animal labor, for instance.
Human slaves were often considered to be less than human or, at the very least, not deserving of basic rights that other humans enjoyed, as part of the moral and ethical frameworks that supported the practice. I think we might see the same shift in dominant ideology if we do have “true” AGI. I’m sure I could be convinced that an intelligence that develops and grows over a number of years begins to have a right to exist and a right to freedom of expression and movement.
Given the outcry/backlash over Dall-E/ChatGPT (what is "real art", etc.) and how much of our society is permeated by a search for authenticity (perceived) already, I wonder if you're right. We might decide "artifical" lifeforms are a lower class than "evolved in nature". For many religions this could be a natural take - made by God vs. folly of man, etc.
So, slavery?