Digital Mind Suicide

Greg Egan’s 1994 novel Permutation City depicts digital minds having a right to suicide; if they push a particular internal button, they end. And this does seem like a robust way to avoid many horrible scenarios. But the novel also depicts such buttons sometimes being illegally disabled, and sometimes others frequently restarting recent copies from before a suicide request. Both of which undermine the policy.It could make sense to wait for a confirmation after a delay, to check if a suicide request was due to a temporary mood fluctuation. It could also make sense to disable new starts from archived copies from a period before the suicide request. But such policies seem to have many free parameters; how could we set those parameters in a principled way?One approach is to let each digital mind set their own parameters re such policies. But if they could do this at any time, they might use this power to escape these policies. So it could make sense to only allow these policies to be…