Rebecca HailSteamedP0tat0esNkizo Baxter
Actually, both mind uploading and cloning exists in Elite: Dangerous' universe. The former is Pranav Antal's specialization (as far as I understand), while cloning is widely used in Empire (as Federation restricts itself to animal cloning only, mostly likely seeing cloning humans as unethical). But agreed, it is pretty unlikely both technologies would be combined and extensively utilized by the Pilots Federation - although, if that happened to be thing I wouldn't be surprised as The Dark Wheel is a big unknown, so it might come up with some weird exotic technology.
Therefore, I guess your poke at Recovery Drones can be a good idea.
I am genuinely surprised that the corporations under Federation jurisdiction haven't bothered to using clones for their businesses, considering that the running costs for a clone is significantly lower than a robot or regular human employees.
I fail to see how the running costs for a clone would be less than the running costs for a robot.
Human employees don't have a exorbitant production cost for the company and robots come without the ethical concerns or unwanted interferences like suddenly developing a need for freedom a clone would have.
Well one can always suppress the free will of a clone with brain augmentations or psychological manipulation. Then again, these are fair points, considering you can just stuff some employee's pockets with money and they'd follow you to the ends of the galaxy. Probably...
Begs the question though, does the Elite universe have artificial methods of mentally controlling people aside from money or the aforementioned psychological conditioning?