I'm writing this post on the day after Christmas, 2019 and I'm not sure when you're reading this but it might be important background that it's not normal to clone humans yet. As far as I know, nobody has cloned a human yet, but today I made a pact with any future copies of myself and you should too. Here's why:

I'm pretty sure that human clones will exist in my lifetime. We've already cloned mammals and the early stage stem cells of humans, and the science seems to be advancing pretty quickly. There's a ton of ethical questions that we'll need to answer as a species as we cross that frontier, but nothing in history tells me that we'll be able to stop people from doing it once it's possible.

Once there are some clones, there are a lot of questions about how they might show up. The most likely case is that something born with my DNA would seem (and be) much younger than me and it wouldn't have any of my experiences or memories that aren't encoded in my genes. In that case, the clone is basically like a child with just one parent, which is interesting but doesn't require any sort of special deal and so that's not the case that I'm thinking about.

I'm thinking about the case where science can also transfer my memories to the new clone and maybe even accelerate it's growth so that it's my same age. This is the kind of clone that shows up most often in science fiction because it creates some of the trickiest ethics and makes for good stories. This is the kind of clone that I'm making a deal with today, long before they could possibly exist.

So here's the deal:

<aside> ✉️ Dear "new B",

Welcome to the world, I hope it wasn't too weird or hard for you to get here. I don't know anything about the cloning process when I'm writing this, but if it was unpleasant then I'm really sorry for my part in making you go through that. Now that you're here, I want you to remember a note that we wrote back at the end of 2019 on the subject of your existence (yes, this one!) and understand the deal we made before you were born.

First, we promise not to kill each other. Having two or more of the same person existing in the world can definitely make things complicated, but we are not murderers. Even if there's some mistake in the cloning process and one of us is maimed in such a way that our existence is mostly suffering, there are other people in our life who know what to do — let them handle that.

Second, we are both "real" but from the moment you woke up we stopped sharing all of our memories and experiences. That means that for a little while we're pretty interchangeable (either of us could go do the same job or fill the same roles in our friends' lives) but quickly we'll both make new memories and connections and we won't be as in sync. Our identities will diverge, and that's a good thing! So you're going to choose a new name (the one of us who was born first gets to keep B), we'll get tattoos together on our hands or wrists so others can differentiate us, and we'll start working immediately to get you new identity documents. You'll also need to get a new job, but we have some time to figure that out.

Third, we may have all of the same feelings for people and relationships, but you will need to reintroduce yourselves into each of them as a new person. That will probably be hard for you (particularly with Erica, who is my fiancée now and will almost certainly be my wife by the time you show up), but I promise I'll do everything I can to let you into those relationships and make you feel welcome. I'm not sure how our relationship will develop (I've never had a clone before!) but no matter how we feel about each other, we both have valid feelings of connections with these people and we're obliged to honor them in each other.

Last, we hold great power over one another. We know things that no one else could possibly know, and we could both use that to hurt the other. Instead, let's use this situation to our advantage! We have a special connection so we make a great team. Maybe we were cloned by some future arch-nemesis to hurt us, or by the government to make be a super soldier, or by someone else for sex stuff (maybe we've watched too many clone movies), but right now we are deciding to be a team. We expect to have each other's backs over anything else.

Okay, that's it, that's our deal. We should both remember making it, so when we meet each other we can reference it immediately (and it'll be here written downif we need to remember any details). Let's have some fun with this!

B

</aside>

Now that that's written, any clone with my memories will remember writing it just as well as I do! This way we can make the deal before our experiences diverge — we're the same person right now making the deal. Once our experiences have started to branch (once the clone exists) it would be much harder to hammer something like this out, mostly because it would require communicating between two different people instead of making these decisions while I'm still both parties.

You're welcome to use my deal as is, or to use it as a starting point for your own. But either way, you should find a place to write down what your deal with your future clone is now, before they exist, so that you don't have to start from scratch if you're confronted with a copy of yourself!

December 26, 2019