The Law Of The Upload

Abstract

In April 2020, Amazon released a new comedy series called “Upload.” The show extrapolates a future in which human consciousness is successfully simulated in silico. In this world, individuals pay to be “uploaded” into a digital afterlife. When uploaded, human consciousness is converted into data and executable code, which can be edited, reset, or even deleted depending on each upload’s membership and payment plan. The show breaks the boundaries between reality and virtual reality, consciousness and artificial intelligence, and even life and afterlife, entangling existing legal questions in novel ways. By addressing three of these legal issues, we hope to highlight how science fiction may help launch a more nuanced conversation about what is artificial in artificial intelligence, what is virtual in virtual reality, and what is digital in digital rights. We argue that becoming early adopters of a new reconceptualized language around “us” and “them”, the “self” and the “other,” can perhaps future proof our society from the technological perils that await us.

Keywords

• artificial intelligence
• AI
• digital afterlife
• legal personhood
• surveillance capitalism
• internet governance