In 1000 years, computing is going to be absurdly, magically, mythically cheap. If we're still in a position where the cost of booting someone up is a constraint

In 1000 years, computing is going to be absurdly, magically, mythically cheap. If we're still in a position where the cost of booting someone up is a constraint, it's probably not a future you want to participate in. If progress continues, laws will be developed to mandate minimum compute resources available for simulants, like a basic right to life for biological people. The basic premise of the article, "Given that running a brain scan still costs money in 1000 years, why should anyone bring you back from the dead? Why should anyone boot you up?" The answer is, something has gone awfully wrong. Understanding cognition and the architecture of human minds has several parallel tracks, some of which should result in what amounts to brute-forcing the problem. It's not unreasonable to expect several of those tracks to converge on a solution within the next 5 decades - breakthroughs could significantly speed up that timeline, and molecular scale imaging is being pursued for many reasons beyond brain science. This is a bit like asking "what if we only have ICE cars in 1000 years?" Technology - especially compute - is on a persistent trajectory, and within 150-200 years, the atomic wizards and tamers of rock lightning should have us to about the halfway point of the Landauer limit, in terms of compute efficiency. It's hard to imagine things will come to a screeching halt, and we'll just live with early 2020s chip technology, give or take, for the rest of human history. We could even optimistically hope that we'd have overcome our collective nimbyist anti-nuclear idiocy and were on totally renewable and nuclear energy, with a thriving, nascent spaceborne civilization working out in the solar system. You'd fire people up because you could - because there will be people who just like to explore the old stuff, because unless something goes wrong, treating brain scan simulants is the moral and humane thing to do. Boredom, curiousity, legislative mandate, slave labor to populate your torment nexus, friends to hang out with in your virtual paradise - there are as many reasons as there are humans. Imagine the heists and treasure hunting possibilities... just spin up the bank CEO and get his passwords and knowledge of the system, or spin up the space pirate for the coordinates of the golden asteroid. I think a better question would be "since it cost time and effort to scan a brain, and this person underwent the procedure willingly, isn't the only moral answer to boot them up?" By the time it becomes a meaningful question, the operational overhead should be trivial. Strange things will come up, like how many copies you're allowed to run, globally and locally, what and how you are to contribute back to society, if at all, what the rights and responsibilities and citizenship and political valence, and all those things. I can't fathom a future where it's ever a matter of "hey, there's a 1000 year old copy of a person here, but nah, we're so bored and jaded, why even bother."