How will uploaded personalities be represented in a government?

You said "assume uploaded personalities have been granted the franchise", which I am interpreting as "assume they are both 'persons' and 'citizens' under the constitution", which would be prerequisites for having a vote.

The constitution assigns voters to representatives based on residency but does not directly define "residence". Other legislation does, though: your residence is tied to your representatives in Congress, to your tax jurisdiction, to your school district, to the criminal code that applies to you, and many other things. The government doesn't determine this residence by detecting it automatically; your residence is based on your testimony -- on a voter-registration card, on a tax return, on a driver's license, and more. Where you are at any given moment in time doesn't matter; it's all based on your residential address. (Some situations might impose reality checks on this; for example, the IRS might overrule your claimed residence if you don't spend enough time there.)

Putting all of this together, I would expect that uploaded personalities (being persons and having the ability to testify in some form) would declare their residence, same as flesh-and-blood persons. They might use the location of the server where they were uploaded (that would be kind of like a birth certificate), or they might choose to move elsewhere -- but until the constitution is amended to consider locations other than physical addresses, uploaded personalities are going to be required to furnish a physical address on which their rights and obligations under the law will be determined.

I don't think it's a given that the constitution would be amended to define a "virtual district" or some such, to contain all uploaded personalities. Uploaded personalities should be as varied as physical ones, and people tend to assemble based on their individual interests. We also have no reason to believe that uploaded personalities would be isolationist; presumably they interact with people, have friends and colleagues, have shared political interests, want to optimize their representation as much as people do (woo, gerrymandering), and more. So in the short term I would expect uploaded personalities to be distributed throughout the current districts according to their interests and preferences.

posted about 9 years ago

Monica Cellio‭ staff

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