You can regularly sync your memories with your copies (either one way or both ways)
All I’d need is one. She’d do doppelgänger work and keep me company sentimentally as well as fulfill, ahem, physical needs.
Yeah, I’d fuck myself too ;)
Isaac Asimov singing “the Clone Song”:
Interesting idea but I would utterly hate a person like me.
The old saying about “you hate in others what reminds you of yourself” feels like it was written for me!
I really need someone to contrast my personality. I’d kick clone out within minutes.
Nah, that’s what you think. You’d be hate fucking yourself before the end of the day
8,093,000,000
Andy Weir - The Egg:
Such a great short story. My first exposure to this was the Kursgesagt animated version:
Absolutely love this so much
One clone so that I can be a stay-at-home dad without losing my income. Finally finish grad school and fix up the house. Show my kid the world when they get old enough to appreciate it. Get a second job once they start school - something to get me outside, or working with people face-to-face. That would be amazing.
That sounds really nice. Nothing excessive, just meeting your needs
Me after splitting myself into any number of copies:
Going dark with it: How much are organs worth on the black market?
Keeping it light: like 4 or 5 maybe, as long as there is no degradation in capabilities I think I could feasibly let 1 do my job, then the rest and myself could pursue other intellectual endeavors. I would also always have a full D&D group and be able to play the multiplayer games I have always wanted to that never had the interest of my friends.
DnD issue: memory sync.
You’re just yourself playing yourself, and all copies know what all copies are thinking.
That’s not a malfunction, it’s a feature.
I always play wildly different characters in my campaigns and like to mix things up. The other players knowing what I am thinking just means that I don’t have to communicate my hair brained schemes.
Of it’s naruto style, I would make a 100 of me, have them all find jobs for a year or two, then collapse them all back and never have to work again aince I now saved for 100+ years.
This post could be phrased better…
If you could split yourself into a copy of yourself… And why is it one?
Imagine being the copy that has to work while one does the family and one is traveling. The ethics of making a copy of myself that is for all purposes a slave would be really weird. Enslaving copies of myself, what a concept. Oh, also one needs to be kept on away for organ needs as I age or get hurt and one with a master copy in case the main “I” dies unexpectedly. yikes
OP says you can sync memories both ways - easy solution is to just take turns.
The second season of Invincible touches on this with the Mauler Twins (which aren’t actually twins, but instead one guy who clones himself and copies over his brain so there is always two of him around):
spoiler
Usually when they make a clone they can’t tell which of them is the original and which is the copy (even though they ought to be able to know by remembering which medical bed the original was lying in, but never mind that), so they work together as equals. However, one time they make a copy after having suffered a disfiguring injury, so they know which one is the original and he lords it over the copy until the copy gets fed up and kills him. The copy sums it up as “sometimes things are the way they are for a good fucking reason.”
That’s assuming your copies have individualism. Where I feel my copies would believe in the greater good. Almost all know the role they play to make my true version incredible.
And knowing myself well, one would absolutely rebel to have empathy for the “worker” versions, and find a middle ground. Maybe 4-day weekends and vacations once a year.
Maybe your awareness splits with each copy, so you go from an “I” to a “we.” No such thing as a “master” copy then, just different organs of the same meta entity
That’s how I see it! It’s very Buddhist.
A lot of folks in the other comments see it as they’re the “Person Prime”, and all the clones are some lesser being. Which I don’t see it that way.
A billion copies to lead a communist revolution. Any more than that would probably be unsustainable globally in the short term while the existing capitalist systems are being dismantled and replaced.
Or 3 or 4 clone friends to help out with daily life.
Both are cool. The latter is probably easier and what my copies could actually manage.
Edit: Actually, the ability to sync memories is so ridiculously overpowered that one could probably achieve pretty much anything with their copies.
It also seems like its usefulness would scale up exponentially the more copies you make, so I’ll go with the first one.
You know that episode of Futurama, where Bender made near infinite copies of himself and nearly the destroyed the world?
Yeah that, but maybe a little slowly since I like to procrastinate.
I would actually take a very different route as a contrast to others on this thread:
I would clone some 20-30 mes and do a speedrun together to gather enough funds to buy a farm, and live out the rest of my life in a commune dream with others like me 🥹
Eventually there’d be other people joining in and I could release more and more of the clones as we gather enough saved up and finish the mortgage and all.
So eventually we’d find something of a balance at around 2-4 clones with which we’d just arrange a rotating system of guaranteeing 3 weeks of free time each between a week of work 😌
Just one. I’d get twice as much software written, and amazing blowjobs.
However…… I’d need to make sure that They have a desire to obey me. Because I don’t do anything I don’t want to do, and I’d very quickly tell “me” to go fuck myself.
There’s an interesting book that goes into these issues…
Kiln People is a 2002 science fiction novel by American writer David Brin
The novel takes place in a future in which people can create clay duplicates (called “dittos” or golems) of themselves. A ditto retains all of the archetype’s memories up until the time of duplication. The duplicate lasts only about a day, and the original person (referred to in the book as an archie, from “archetype”, or “rig”, from “original”) can then choose whether or not to upload the ditto’s memories. Most dittos want to inload, so that their experience will be continuous with that of their archie.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiln_People
My wife and I joke about how we could really use a “grey” some days.
Damn that sounds like a fun read.
Just the one, we’d both sit around doing nothing. Get him to give me a hand job, it’s not gay if it’s you right?
I’d be less concerned with gay and more concerned with doing your immediate family…
