I definitely think that we should embrace it, because we literally have nothing to lose, so there would be no reason not to. However, at the same time, after having watched the first season of Altered Carbon, I’ve become a bit more apprehensive in my feelings on the matter, as it’s a semi complex issue to unravel.
I think that when humanity one day achieves the ability to digitize our personalities; many will do so for the sole purpose that their progenyself can live on forever. In the same way that all parents want their kids to live forever, people would want their progenyself to live forever.
It may seem selfish, but it's actually not as selfish as one might think, because it wouldn't be you, but rather a clone of you. I tend to disbelieve that actual consciousness transfer will ever be possible. I’ve explained a little bit of why I think that in this post.
As far as our progenyself is concerned, if backed up regularly, it would continue uninterrupted potentially indefinitely, and would probably never remember being destroyed, only near misses. In that sense, after much time has elapsed death would become a foreign concept to it, and that would no doubt alter its personality in great and unpredictable ways.
Yet, that wouldn’t be our personality, or experience; because we the biological would most likely have been dead and gone many eons ago. There’s a caveat to that, but it’s a big if, and it’s the idea that if somehow our consciousness was simply a unique algorithm, like a finger print, that never changes, from the moment that you are born, to the moment that you die.
If that is somehow magically the case, then the very moment that the first consciousness is cloned and activated, then both the digital, and the biological will suddenly have a sense of bilocation, wherein they will be both acutely aware of both lives simultaneously. Instantaneous quantum entanglement, if you will.
It would be like if a one-eyed individual suddenly grew a second eye. There would be an additional perspective added to the original. Now I don’t know the likely hood of this, it’s just a fantasy in my brainpan for now. Yet, even if it is not what would happen if our consciousness was cloned, maybe we can make something similar happen.
When you consider Elon Musk’s neural net, if he should one day defeat the I/O barriers in information transfer, then theoretically speaking… A man, and his progencyself; they could share their experiences both seamless, and instantaneously. This would give them, the man, and the machine a real sense of selves, and each other’s memories in real time. If one should be blotted out of existence, it might be really difficult to determine if a real death had occurred.