It’s not exactly the most pressing concern to sort out how we’d conduct justice should it become possible for humans to upload consciousness to computers and attain a sort-of immortality for our sort-of selves. But it may be theoretically possible and makes for a fun bull session, so Conor Friedersdorf penned a well-written cautionary essay on the topic for the Atlantic, which also considers other unintended consequences of the endless summer. An excerpt:

Radical life extension would so scramble and confound our normal notions of justice that there’s no telling how future Americans would react to the new reality. Historic monsters might be punished for 6 million years … or just three or four times longer than a 150-year sentence a U.S. court imposed on this obscure money-launderer. It’s hard to speculate even when confining ourselves to descendants of ours, in this country, with moral codes closely resembling our own.

In fact, it isn’t clear how we’d react right now.

If today’s Americans magically took custody of servers containing the disembodied consciousnesses of every figure ever mentioned in the country’s newspapers, going back to the beginning, would we stop at punishing former Nazi leaders? Would there be a protest movement to hold Native American killers and slaveholders accountable? What about the folks behind the Tuskegee syphilis experiment? Or the city leaders of towns in the Jim Crow South that subjugated blacks?•