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Star Trek isn't interested in predicting the future, because most of the stuff just beyond the horizon is either deeply scary or plays havoc with plots that depend on putting the characters in danger.

If you have a hundred backup copies of your mind all over the solar system, what do you care if one of you gets killed? How can you possibly write a plausible plot that includes a weakly godlike AI that doesn't involve it instantly solving any problem that faces the protagonists? How can current audiences relate to a world where the population of the Earth is 100 trillion, all of them running as uploaded minds on computers?

(Disclaimer, I'm not a fan of Star Trek: http://bbot.org/badtranscript-startrek2.html )

[r00fus]

Read Altered Carbon [1] - this book addresses this question.

[1] http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40445.Altered_Carbon

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For plot reasons, the world of Altered Carbon only lets you run one copy at a time, offsite backups are very expensive, (even though individual stacks are so cheap that literally every person in the world has one installed?) and the time between backups is 24 hours.

In the real world, there's no reason to expect any of these limitations to exist. It makes more sense for backups to be cheap(ish) and taken every five minutes.

SPOILERS:

Altered Carbon also addresses the nightmare scenario of state vector theft very well; if the bad guys have a copy of your mind, they can torture you to death, over and over, forever. But in the real world, the precise mechanism of capture used in the book would be unlikely: if you thought you were about to be kidnapped, you'd just suicide, (using a explosive charge in your brain) and let one of your backups figure out what happened.

[r00fus]

I also thought that the book didn't go into the deep effects of having sleeves and backups, as simliar as Star Trek doesn't go into full effects of transporter technology (terrorism of non-warp stations/planets via transported explosive/poison would be unstoppable - forcing the development and pervasiveness of passive transport shielding - think faraday cage)