this is how i imagine it being:
The sick:
Narrated by:
Congratulations, you have being found to have terminal brain cancer and your premium health insurance now covers 'most' the financial cost of uploading your mind, just enough for your credit rating to fetch you a second house mortgage that will cover the rest. Just sign here, and understand we are not viable to any errors, lost memories or personality changes that may happen during the procedure, and here, this says you've being notified of all the potential dangers and the process has being explained to you to the best of your understanding.
What? You want me to actually do that? You don't care i am late for my coffee break? Your just one self serving egoistical man who can't care about anything other then his own mortality, aren't you? Alright, well, first get you ready to surgery because there's about a million complications that can go wrong in any surgery not to mention brain surgery... And we take in a last moment photo of your brain activity, and let Mumbai's finest remote surgeons, by which i mean first time interns who have absolutely no sense of connection or responsibility regarding your life that might come from a face to face meeting, do their god damn best to re-rout all your systems and hook up your brain up on life support so they can both survive that precious moment of pulling it out and putting it in the freezer, and hope to god we didn't scratch that little memory of your loved one's faces while we do it. Then we carefully slice it up and painstakingly scan it with the highest resolution we can on specialized equipment to handle your frozen tissue so we can get you all in one state. Why? You heard the news of what happened to that monkey a few years back? That's was some bad PR nobody wants.
Next, we put all that data onto the most mind boggling inefficient simulation the world of computing has ever seen, one where despite running on a much faster computer then your brain could ever reach, you will still experience everything slower and talk like a retarded kangaroo, because frankly we don't really know what makes you tick so we shove as much much redundancy in it as we can.
We do recognize that at this point in time, the majority of your life, family life, social life, and whatever poor excuse of a love life you might have, many aspects of your work environment etc' involve your physical presence, and since you are one of the luckier ones to have come here mostly intact, you won't need to go around looking like a disfigured war veteran, for the most part we'll just wire up your body's nervous system with wireless signals with the same way we do to paralysis and stroke victims, the only difference is that instead of directly to your skull, we will send the signals to this heavy duty computer, which you can carry around with you, or face an extreme delay in response and sensory information.
And you will do all of that, because as stupid as it sounds, the other option is plain death.
Rights? Ofcourse you have rights, haven't you being watching slightly more recognized talkshow Vblogs? You now belong to an elite group of poor tragedy victims, you don't make for a big enough consumer audience for specialized products so at this point your only augmentation is not needing OLED contact lenses or nerve scanners or motion capture camera to play the long lasting World Of Warcraft, and other then that your going to have the aesthetic appeal of a miserable poor handicap person and have the response time of a really unlucky retarded autistic kid, and going after that just doesn't make anyone look good, hell the more the extremists say you don't have a soul the easier it becomes to cast you as a victim of prosecution, and pretty much everyone and their mother wants you to be cast that way so that the whole debate about your rights can be put to rest -advertisement companies are paying billions to get brainscan statistics which you have just wavered, medical companies can't stop seen the opportunities here, credit card companies are jumping at the opportunity to get you into decades worth of debt. So you have rights, the right to pay your bills, and you're going to have plenty.
Soul? No no no, now we call it "emergent pattern of being", and if your religion hasn't embraced it, ask it why it gave you terminal cancer and change to one that has until you get a better answer to why this or that mysterious plan doesn't involve you living a long happy life, or better yet, sue your religious institution for discrimination. If your not willing to give it up so easily, consider joining the lunatic sub group of mind uploads that believe they have lost their souls because they have nothing better to blame for the fact they felt so sorry for themselves that they pushed everyone away.
Ow, and good luck.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
the pigs:
the above is pretty much how i imagine the early non-experimental commercial use of mind uploading, and for a good while it's going to be a far-cry away from something any well adjusted self respecting person might want if they have any chance to live without it.
The first bottle neck will be an economically viable market:
For many of Moore's law following cycles, the main affect would be in cost and accessibility, not in offering raw power to the few who somehow can pay for this even after paying for the procedure. software efficiency, direct cognitive modifications or enhancements, direct nerve-feedback simulations/games, budgeted experiment at remanding separated copies, or any specialized product or service that only mind uploads can really enjoy and thus any additional abilities, is going to take some time.
This in turn will mean that even after this start, quite a bit of software development and workflow efficiency (much of it might even be due to studying uploaded mind activities) will actually be geared towards the fastest servers the cloud has to offer, with an interface that assumes a certain relativity between the speed of the operator and the speed of the software. This means that even as the upload's processing speeds exceeds biologically human brain speed due to raw hardware improvements, many jobs that depend on said software's would have little to no increase in efficiency when utilized by uploads.
Further more, many of the upload's aren't going to be of the jobs your thinking of when you think of the singularity, many of the earliest ones will be retired elderly, war veterans, etc'.
But the cheaper the procedure gets, the more of an all-consuming medical solution it would become. Gradually it would leave other purely biological treatments in the cold in terms of comparative financial viability, and the more people will join the ranks, the faster the bottleneck will break. and once it does, it will flood: The notion of doing it for the sake of immortality would become much more popular when one see's mind uploads functioning in healthy happy lives; The workplace discrimination will turn it's tide towards the mental uploads, especially in the more mentally tasking jobs.
From the poor and the sick, they would become the new big fat cats, uploads in their thousands will migrate to central cities to be closer to major stock exchange even if their job is not directly related, simply because that will be a huge impacting force on the rate in terms of economical shifts every industry will need to listen too. The faster one experiences reality, the bigger the impact of information delays, and from an upload's POV, the internet will seem to function slower and slower at longer distances. Some will migrate literally, but as more uploads can have a richer and fuller social life, family life and love life within virtual interfaces where they get all the feedbacks they would want from the physical world, many will migrate via servers. Many later uploads might choose to not keep their bodies or simply to not purchase new ones if something happens to the old one's, others might rent robotic outlets when they want too or when a job requires it, sometimes humanoid, sometimes they'd need to operate real world robots with specific purposes, other times they'd rent a robotic dove for kicks, or perhaps even utilize body-exchange services from those who spend a lot of times within servers but keep their bodies on hold.
At this point the politics is going to get messy - as more people live longer then they 'should' the question of immortality will hit hard, the question of copy-liability will be a big one and so will "upload slavery" in various forms from copy licensing by consent to modifications which make them content only from doing designated tasks , copy-experimentation data mining for various scenario's without the original's consent, freshly-made uploads that weren't biological in their past, will all be major issues. When a day's vacation in offline "real time" put's one months out of date from their online upload lives, the social division will steadily grow, while unemployment would hit a new rock bottom for those who actually need the wage to get food on the table and pay for water bills (Quite possibly in the midst of environmental crisis). Religious claims about soulless robots will become a great vehicle for the public rage. Frankly, I don't think we can pass this without some ugly separatist voices along the way, and yes, those voices might win a few elections.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
The singularity:
I think this has a better chance at providing us with a capable singularity then any other process, maybe because I am biased, but I think that the chances are, we will learn how to read the existing templates of general intelligence before figuring out how to write a better one. eventually, There will be CPU development companies employing mind uploads R&D exclusively, and an uploaded scientific community to breach through the thickest paradigm shifts, all while enjoying the fruits of their work in their own speeds of work, leading to the self reinforcing feedback loop known as the singularity. This is also the one least conforming to the metaphor, because it actually does maintain understandable principles and rules - rather then being a god like AI (though those might be developed within it), a somewhat recognizably human society of sorts, doing what civilization does best - grow and shake the balance of its environment (In this case, the social-economic one).
From the POV of those within it, almost anything that happens outside of it might as well be a conversation about future geological changes in terms of relevance, and any resulting hiccups such as power usage or physical storage will quickly become elements most people just live with, taken care of in the background, but knowing that by the time the jupiter brain or whatnot is constructed more subjective time would pass then you've experienced your entire life time so far is going to push much of it to the sidelines.
From the POV of those outside of it, in a near instant you would live in the shadows of a civilization thousands of times older then your own, which is not that uncommon, much like we have between the fall of the great empires of ancient era and the enlightenment age, in fact most of written history, so we know that such a reality is livable, the only difference being the origins of said civilization, and that it isn't a dead civilization.
_____________________________________________-
the parts that directly relate to the physical manifestation balded.
