The prospect of brain emulation raises difficult ethical problems

I draw upon several hundred papers in my book Here Be Dragons: Science, Technology and the Future of Humanity, which is currently going through the copy-editing stages at Oxford University Press, and is scheduled to appear in January 2016. One of those papers is Anders Sandberg's Ethics of brain emulations, which was published last year in the Journal of Experimental & Theoretical Artificial Intelligence, and which draws attention to a host of unusual and difficult ethical issues that the prospect of brain emulation gives rise to. The journal's publisher, Taylor & Francis, offers the following crisp and elegant summary of the paper.

See also Anders' recent blog post Ethics for neural networks.