This may be a clunky analogy, but is this fundamentally different than a killing a human as long as we keep a record of their DNA sequence? Maintaining the information doesn't seem enough to negate snuffing out the execution of that information
The generic AI could be "playing" in a thousand virtual environments at once. Killing one of them doesn't really have a parallel in human life, or ethics.
I mean, yes, you killed a sentient being. But if that sentient being has a thousand concurrent lives, then what does "killing" one of those lives even mean? And if it can respawn another identical life in a millisecond, does it even count as killing?
I suspect that having sentient virtual entities will provide philosophy and ethics majors a lot of deep thinking room. As it already has for SciFi authors.
Would this opinion change if scientists were able to prove the multiverse theory where there are infinite numbers of "us" living concurrent lives as well?
