Secure homes for digital people

Abstract

Being a “digital person” could be scary—if I don’t have control over the hardware I’m running on, then someone else could get my code and run tons of copies in horrible conditions. It would be great to guarantee digital people some control over their situation: 1. to control their local environment and sensations, 2. to avoid unauthorized rewinding or duplicating. I’ll describe how you could modify the code of a digital person so that they retain this control even if an adversary has access to their source code. This would be very expensive with current cryptography. I think the overhead will eventually become cheap enough that it’s possible to do for some digital people, though it will likely remain expensive enough that it is never applied to most digital people (and with luck most digital people will be able to feel secure for other reasons).