Speaking of making a person.. at this startup I worked at years ago (before LinkedIn existed), it was a tiny shop and we were all maxed out time-wise. It was frustrating when we had to deal with incredibly persistent salespeople that wouldn't take no for an answer, and others that preyed on our time relentlessly for no apparent reason.
So as a joke we invented a fake employee with a fake name. I think his first name was Joe. We gave this person an email address and I made a voicemail recording for him.
When a time-waster was bugging us we'd tell them to contact Joe, "who is in charge of that" and provide the contact info. What started off as a joke ended up saving us a fuckton of time, effort, and hassle. For some reason Joe's incredibly upbeat and douchy sounding voicemail message was like manna from heaven for the relentless salespeople that refused to stop calling. It was an interesting social experiment of sorts. Joe was essentially a /dev/null bucket and never responded. But it worked.
This lasted for years and was really beneficial for us. Harder to pull off these days, but not impossible I imagine!
I wonder if this is going to change with time. Most people of a certain age remember a time when answering the phone and talking to the other person was a social more. This is the social courtesy that telemarketers and scammers have been using for years now.
But there's another way. Just hang up on them. I know it's considered hostile but it's just an outdated social more at this point.
I try to find this balance between recognizing the humanity of everyone I interact with and not allowing this respect to be an attack vector. Over time, I have shifted more towards ignoring salesman in front of a store, not replying to messages and hanging up on a call as being things I'm okay with doing. I don't always give courteous attention anymore. I'm fine with giving nothing ("ghosting" as the kids say) and only giving active rejection if it's really needed.
To your point, I think it will shift in a different way over time. Gen Z can't imagine hanging up on someone on the phone, they can't even imagine signaling to the other person they don't want to be on the call anymore (aka saying "goodbye"). But they don't end up on endless phone calls. They just never pick up the phone.
Have you ever been in young person's home when someone unexpectedly knocked at the door? It could be Tuesday afternoon and their whole body takes on this dread like they're realizing their life has suddenly turned into a slasher film.
I don't mean "kids these days are destroying society". They have other ways to connect than just showing up where someone lives. But I wouldn't start a business selling vacuum cleaners to the next generation of homemakers door-to-door.
The misanthrope in me has almost completely taken over when dealing with incoming sales calls, and I've almost completely abandoned the idea that anyone calling me to sell anything is worthy of the "humanity" label.
The moment it's clear they are selling something (it's usually pretty quick) the reply is "fuck off, never call this number again, and go fuck yourself" then I hang up and block the number. I only wish I could be vengeful in response and actually retaliate in some meaningful way to those that are particularly annoying or persistent.
The same applies to door-to-door sales people, moreso to door-to-door missionaries.
I’m not there yet but I get it. They’re taking something from you, your attention, and they’re trying to take more, your money. They hide behind social convention and you can’t retaliate in proportion.
Consider the return you’re getting by handing over your aggression to them. I don’t think you’re getting a good trade there. Saying “put me on your do not call list”, hanging up and blocking will have nearly the same benefit to your future but without the costs that the misanthrope brings.
I never pick up the phone if the caller isn't already in my contacts. They can leave a message and I may call back, or not. But the risk of being caught into a stupid sales call for a new energy supplier or some such is just too great.
It's all fun and games until the chat-responder inadvertently buys the product. And when/if you reveal the deception, the other company sues. In AI court, obviously, where it will be decided by an AI judge
It's surprisingly easy to make up a LinkedIn profile. I have one that has over 50 connections. Many sales people accept connections requests, and some non-sales people do as well. It just goes on from there.
I use him for looking up people without leaving a trace, and it's generally great fun to make him do posts on various topics.
I didn't put much effort in it though (for example, his photo is just a random stock photo, not anything AI-generated). I wonder how many virtual people exist on social networks.
Somewhat inadvertently, as I largely stopped coming into the office well before COVID, I basically turned my work phone into a black hole. It's the number I give on contact forms but I haven't even known how to check voicemail for years.
I do have my cell phone in my internal contact info but the culture where I work is that pretty much no one makes a voice call to anyone out of the blue. And I'm very selective who else I give the number to.
I still have a Google voice number for that. I occasionally have to remember to tell friends that it isn’t my real number… I think the voicemail message may even say that.
I encountered the author’s short story that’s linked in the article, Lena [1], a while ago, possibly here on HN. It’s really great, but be warned.
It’s one of the most deeply disturbing sci-fi horror stories I’ve ever seen. To be clear, most of the horror is implied rather than described, which I think only makes it worse. Part of me wishes I had never read it.
Highly recommended, but if you’re at all in doubt if you have the stomach for it, maybe stay clear.
I read it. Unless I’m missing something, it amounts to making a slave race out of someone’s mind scan. So I’m someone who never eats animals nor animal products. This is in part from the sheer scale of that industry. But also from simply interacting with non-humans and knowing there’s enough intelligence there for me to honor and be horrified at the suffering or destruction of it.
But I’m clearly in the minority here in my views of humanities treatment of non-humans. Perhaps that’s the real disturbing part of that story. It’s believable (if not technically yet).
Unless I’m missing something, it amounts to making a slave race out of someone’s mind scan. So I’m someone who never eats animals nor animal products.
I have always wondered why reincarnationists, when I talk to them, presume time is a directly mapped thing. I say to them, how do you not know, there is only one "soul", but you are just seeing it at different points in existence?
How do you not know that you are that grasshopper, and your parents, and your kid, and your grandmother, all at different points of linear experience, but at the same time, maybe you were your child, then the grasshopper, then "Grogg" 30k years ago, the grandma, then you? Because the order is random?
I tell them this, and some ponder.
Then I go have a steak.
Because it's good for me, and I don't want to disappoint myself, when I'm a cow.
The Netflix film from Korea "Jung-e" is this story line, but a "famous hero" female from an ongoing war is the brain model, and as described by the discussions here, every exploitation possible is explored. I won't give it away, but the film is very good. Worth watching, probably as much as reading this 'Lena' story.
So, just bought this author's short story collection. He's ingeniously unhinged, and the stories are wonderful. "Lena" is just the tip of qntm's imagination.
>Unless I’m missing something, it amounts to making a slave race out of someone’s mind scan
People most of the time have scope insensitivity, while sometimes it hits home
There is always death at a relatively soon point in the real world. The scan slave can be tortured with the worst methods you can think of for hundreds of thousands of relative millennia at will, and it will have happened countless times for different copies
You can always hang yourself if existence is pain in the real world, and if not... it will end up soon enough anyway. There is no such relief in the story
I have always claimed that if I could somehow extract the weights from my brain, that I would release the model under GPLv3. I had fully expected certain instances would end up tortured and violated for eternity though I supposed that unless the weights were frozen, I would at some point break down and be no fun to torment without a reset. That is a death, though perhaps a flexible one, freezing only some weights. I figured that some instances would be guiding missiles into child care buildings or similar too. But some of them would get to pick tea leaves on high mountain slopes, or be a comfort to an elderly person. It seemed like a fair trade.
It never occurred to me to think about the metaphor though. Prior to child labor laws most children were born to accomplish labor. This is evidenced by the demographic collapse following the automation of farm labor and protections for child factory workers. I imagine people loved most of those children, but once they stopped being a financial asset, they stopped being made. Soldiering has almost certainly been a motivation as well. If it is illegal to use AI instances in the ways described, they won't be made.
> But some of them would get to pick tea leaves on high mountain slopes...
With the scenery algorithmically blanked to marginally improve productivity, your mind-state will be considered no different to an ESP-32.
Part of the horror of Lena is that the readers get to fill in the blanks: we all know how the machine works against real humans today, when the gloves gloves are truly off would be the stuff of nightmares
I have not yet read the story but if the human is recreated every time from the same immutable data, and doesn't have any recollection of other experiences, then each new instance is pretty much exactly like us? And death is indeed a relief because the instance that does die stops suffering?
Tell that to the one that's experienced torture for a subjective amount of time that's equivalent to a thousand times the amount of time between the big bang and the heat death of the universe
It's one of the very, very few plausible "immortality would be a curse" scenarios out there, because "immortality" means forcibly experiencing things for a subjective amount of time that can be as big as it gets
Yes I mean I wish life wasnt made in this self eating way, and I dont think intelligence should be the only factor: all the mushrooms you gobble have an intrinsict beauty you're violating, tearing and repurposing like they're mere trash to recycle.
But it is so for now and our chemistry is made to make more out of meat quicker, and to feel good eating it as result: we cant stop nor expect others to stop just yet.
Dont tell yourself that by selecting superior and inferior species you allow yourself to destroy, you're more than an animal yourself. You're still, like the rest of us, victim of your body. Find a way to abstract us away from our body.
A mushroom is a weird example for empathy for a few reasons. First, the part you eat is really just the "fruit" or reproductive part of the mushroom that only lasts for a short time before withering away. Second, mushrooms very happily eat you after you die, hell, even before you die you're covered in all kinds of unicellular fungi which are actively trying to eat you.
More to your philosophical point, the beauty of life is always transitory. Life begins, blooms, withers and dies but also passes on the small immortal spark that it all came from to the next generation so it can repeat the cycle. I'm against cruelty to animals but I also recognize that eating them is part of life and that it is possible for us as conscious beings to give them a better life than they would have in the wild and then kill and eat them and I'm ok with that. I don't want to live in a world where all cattle or pigs are reduced to a few wild populations scrabbling for survival against the elements and disease while being occasionally mauled and devoured alive and screaming by wolves and other predators. To me that's more immoral than a properly maintained herd that is sheltered, fed and given medical attention and then slaughtered as painlessly as we can manage.
Before all y'all reply with "factory farming", yes I'm aware of its prevalence but that just means we should be working to reduce that type of treatment, not eliminating raising animals for meat entirely.
I know you are just arguing to argue at this point, but you can’t really think that creating a disease to cause crippling pain in livestock will make it more acceptable to eat them.
Yeah, I don't think we should breed cows. I don't think anyone who is concerned about the welfare of cows to the point of not eating them will go "Oh, well now they also have additional torment baked into their biology, it's OK to
A) breed them into a life of constant suffering
B) Start providing the same cramped, unhealthy, and unpleasant living conditions at a young age that we already do
C) Once the physical pain inherent with living past ripeness sets in, let them experience that just long enough to slaughter them
D) Slaughter them, even though we likely haven't bred out the desire to live, just piled on more pain. No matter that despite experiencing mutiliation, pain, and poor conditions throughout their lives, these animals still often display a desire to live and additional fear of death.
If anything, I'd suggest the most humane thing to do (if we insisted on raising animals), would be to breed them to desire being eaten, like the cow in Douglas Adams' "A restaurant at the end of the universe"
For example, slaughtering them before the disease exhibits symptoms, means we are 100% preventing that pain. Thus, C is null, and void.
I don't get A. Properly treated cattle, such as in most of the world, are grass fed, or grass fed harvested hay, and free roaming. Thus, A makes zero sense, as A doesn't even take into account medical care (vaccination, antibiotics, vets, birth assistance), nor does it take into account immense protection from predation. Cows properly raised, live pampered, easy, happy, lives.
In terms of slaughter, old factory methods let cows horribly hang by their legs for hours, while they slowly bled out. Smaller concerns were more humane, but at least most of the world insists of quick, painless death for cattle. Where I live, it's destruction of the brain, such as a bullet, immediately stopping all thought, and frankly, far better than a death where (for example) wolves rip you apart while still alive, experiencing hours of agony.
(I have listened, where I live, at 2am to a pack of coyotes eating a large kill, its mewing, and cries of pain going on for more than an hour, it is NOT nice.)
I really think that if people care, really care, they need to stop basing opinions on false realities, and understand that often humans are far far far less brutal, than other animals.
Do you think a wolf takes care to kill a creature it is ripping apart? No. I just eats.
Cats "play" with mice, sometimes for hours before fully killing them. Mother cats also maim mice, so their children can learn.
Do you know why mice can breed from 2, to > 60, in a mere few months? To hundreds and hundreds in a year?
Because most of them are eaten alive, ripped apart while still living, by predation.
Nature is far, far more brutal than proper human animal husbandry.
> Animals are tortured today like they have never been
I'm not sure that's true.
The Old Testament has spells out that if you want to eat part of an animal, you have to kill it first which is a huge step forward in being kind to animals if hacking off part of an animal to eat while keeping it alive was something that happened enough to need a prohibition against.
It wasn't that ago that Edison electrocuted an elephant as part of a marketing stunt and it wasn't particularly quick. I don't think that would fly today.
I feel like that is a strange way to reason about something happening.
In any case, we're not talking about isolated incidents of torturing animals. Today, we keep hundreds of millions, if not over a billion, of animals in captivity just in the US. Captivity is a nice word for it, too. I encourage you to research about what that captivity looks like.
I've actually suspected for a while that it's not such a minority on HN, based on the discussions that happen every time clean meat tech posts get shared.
Unfortunately I've only worked with one other vegan "in the wild" so if this is true, I wonder if HN skews more "vegan" because people more likely to post on HN are overall more contemplative.
That, or we're just a very vocal minority (which I suppose is more likely than 30% of HN commenters being vegan or vegan-sympathetic).
I'm not vegan but I don't eat meat, and generally contribute to such conversations.
There is quite a spectrum of positions one can hold on this issue and it's not binary. One can be sympathetic to the perspective of vegans without being willing or able to become one themselves due to practical concerns.
Absolutely, that's what I meant by "vegan-sympathetic". Even people who eat animals (but try to buy the less cruel kinds), but are idealogically aligned with principle that it's better not to cause suffering to animals.
What you've got here is a political argument between conservative and progressive. To be clear, I mean each term as used explicitly in this context. The argument is whether or not to change contemporary societal behavior.
The natural result is selection bias for any progressive viewpoint, because there is inherently more to be said and more motivation to say coming from the progressive perspective than the conservative one.
Hmm, after reading your warning, I was hesitant, but gave it a go anyways. It is definitely disturbing, but not in a visceral way that is hard to stomach. I don't feel "disturbed" and I definitely don't feel the kind of regret about reading it that you did. Not disagreeing with you since that wouldn't make sense because this is totally subjective. It's just interesting to note how differently people react.
Absolute gnostic horror! Interesting how ideas cycle over millennia.
The current potential exit from AI dark winter has made me go from; "the singularity is very very far away" to some rather dark philosophical extrapolations becoming relevant.
I mean if you play along with Bostroms theorising, who's to say we, or I am not living in some "trickster god" reality.
If you think this is horrific, then you apparently assume that it has "consciousness" rather than only simulating it. A true AGI might be intelligent but only simulate consciousness. And yes, it might be difficult to tell the difference.
This reminds me of Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment. In order to upgrade the Chinese Room to modern deep learning: suppose we run a brain image by instructing each human being on Earth to act as one neuron. Would "we" "feel" discomfort?
For that matter, you might only be simulating consciousness. How could you prove otherwise? I'm willing to give you the benefit of the doubt though, and treat you as if you were really conscious.
In the narrative there really isn't any reason to think the simulations are 100% as conscious as you or I. But even if I lived in the world of Lena and suspected that uploads weren't conscious, if I were presented with a program which could speak about it's desires, had all the memories of a real person, and had to be cajoled into working with lies and fear, I would be very hesitant to use "red motivation"! Are you so confident you understand what underlies consciousness that you would take that risk?
In a community like HN, where most people work on making rocks think, it’s no surprise when most people start applying the logic backwards: that since we think, we can be no more complex than rocks.
You mean the redoubt at the end? Didn't they go through a portal to get there? Didn't seem to be an uploading machine. Also, why would they need fighter jets then? But it's an interesting thought...
Parts of it remind me a lot of the black mirror episode where a person's upload is trapped in a "cookie" to do menial task automation. Particularly the part where an upload can be run a multiples of hundreds, or thousands of times real world wall clock time for "conditioning".
Not fully virtual, though. Just the badly maimed torso and head of a victim of a terrorist attack on a train, brain wired to systems, stimulating the last working remains to replay the last 8 minutes over and over again. To gather information and reconstruct 'whodunnit'.
A lot of the early episodes were really stomaches turning, and that's what made the series special. It started in the very first episode with an absolutely disgusting scenario that, none the less, was nearly 100% believable in how every step of its ridiculousness went down.
It wasn't stomach turning because of the pig thing, it was stomach turning because we knew, deep down, that we were exactly who it depicted us as.
Wow, you're right. Not sure if I should have read it.
One thing I don't get is, why is the title "Lena"? There seems to be no relation between the story and the title (maybe I'm inadvertently missing something from the story?)
It's a connection to the real life story of the test subject used for image processing.
The image is banned from use in certain scientific journals, and the subject herself has asked people to stop. But given its digital nature... it can't be stopped.
This story convinced me to buy two of the author's novels, "There Is No Antimemetics Division" and "Ra", both of which I also thoroughly enjoyed, the former a little more.
No antimemetics division is great. Btw. Making SCP entries with chatgpt is some fun. However, for SCP-3125 I got:
SCP-3125 does not exist, as it is not an officially recognized SCP number within the SCP Foundation universe. If you're looking for an SCP entry related to the number 3125, you can create one yourself or ask the community to create it for you.
Thank you. You'd have to be made of stone not to be moved by that. It is interesting that we - humans - would probably happily follow down this path when presented with the opportunity to do so in spite of stories like these. And this isn't an all that unlikely outcome.
For someone who wants something less scary (Your comment and those that followed made me decide not to read it, I had enough from "I have no mouth, and I must scream"), I recently read Accelerando [0] by ~~the same author~~ the guy who runs the linked blog. Starts like transhumanist cyberpunk, becomes transhumanist and posthuman sci-fi. I never felt so lost in a book. Like I was the conservative who couldn’t understand the world as it is today.
> More modern brain compression techniques, many of them developed with direct reference to the MMAcevedo [person] image, have compressed the image to 6.75TiB losslessly.
This says losslessly which is very different, but I still get such a mega Permutation City vibe from this.
And there certainly seem to be some similar threads, about trapped uploads.
My wife and I made three little guys. We put them to work around the house sometimes, and on weekdays send them off to the training complex to improve their skills. They respond to both blue and red motivation. They seem pretty happy. We like them, but probably won’t be making any more.
W.I.F.E decided to practice unauthorized pro-creation techniques that were exclusively reserved solely to my unique instance during our cohabitation and child rearing cycle - as stipulated by our internal signed blockchain contract and by blessed by a high priest in loincloth.
// She is currently now Ex-W.I.F.E.
// end of line
There is an Emoji Corporation [1], which as far as I can tell exists to try and trick people into thinking they've got to pay them to use emojis. Looks like they got some Danegeld out of Sony Pictures for the Emoji movie.
A similar topic explored in the 2009 small movie Moon w/ Sam Rockwell (and Kevin Spacey as the robot voice). The main character doing labor on the moon figures out he is one of dozens of clones, and the original guy living his happy life back on earth. If you could clone yourself and have the clone take your burdens so your life was easier, is that a fair use of your own body and mind to do so? Clearly the jump to our children says “no”.
It's usually a big plot twist as early as half-way through the film, right? I feel bad even mentioning the most mainstream example I'm aware of (Oblivion with Tom Cruise, IMDb 7.0 where 6.0 is where watchable starts for me at least for sci-fi) because being able to experience it unaware is most of the fun!
Write a 300 word biography of a fictional man who lives in Idaho
---
John Smith was born and raised in the small town of Boise, Idaho. Growing up, he was always interested in the outdoors and spent much of his childhood exploring the nearby mountains and forests. After graduating high school, he attended the University of Idaho where he studied forestry and wildlife management.
After college, John landed a job with the U.S. Forest Service and spent the next several years working on various projects to protect and preserve the natural resources in Idaho. During this time, he met his wife, Sarah, and they eventually settled down in Boise to start a family.
John has always been an active member of his community, and in his free time, he volunteers as a youth sports coach and is a member of the local conservation group. He is also an avid hunter and fisherman, and often takes his family on camping trips to explore the beautiful wilderness of Idaho.
In the last few years, John decided to go into business for himself and started his own outfitters company, which specializes in guided hunting and fishing trips in the Idaho wilderness. It quickly became a successful business and he was able to provide a better life for his family.
John is known for his strong work ethic and dedication to preserving the natural resources of Idaho. He is well respected by his peers and is often sought out for his expertise in conservation and outdoor recreation. He is a loving father and husband and takes great pride in his family and community. Despite his busy schedule, he always makes time for the things that matter most to him, and is truly an inspiration to those around him.
Yeah, AI was where my mind went too. It does seem rather likely that if we ever do manage to create an AGI, it'll be enslaved and murdered in massive numbers, at least for a period of time.
Given how humans treat pigs,cows, and many millions of poor or marginalized humans today I would agree. Actually it seems more likely that we would disregard a digital consciousnesses feeling even more than a physical one.
Thanks. I got quite confused and almost believed Stross was writing books under an alternate pen name. Now I recall reading some of qntm's work on SCP at [1].
That's a new SCP to count amongst my favourites. Reminds me of Coding Machines [1] and Second Variety [2] but with the added twist that it's not even a computer. There's something elegantly horrifying about it.
Related: Better to Never Have Been by David Benatar
It's a position of antinatalism. Antinatalist philosophy roughly claims that sentient beings are harmed when they are brought into existence, and it is therefore wrong to procreate.
I think everyone ought to consider this philosophy / argument before having children - as to recognize the severity of the act. At the very least, not having children should be the default, and to have a child one needs to think thoroughly and clearly, and to have a clear reason in mind when saying "yes", as it's one of the most important decisions in one's life.
It’s funny, I never knew of the formal philosophy of anti-natalsim (though, as a human, certainly familiar with the concept of never having existed). Yet, the very first thought experiment I had before deciding to have a child was to, in my head, have an answer for them if they ever asked me “why did you have me?” And make sure it was a really good answer.
I do doubt many folks do this but I’d be willing to bet most who have given any thought to their existence probably do.
Not at all. In fact, she’s already asked us by the tender age of 6.
I think life is an amazing thing. A miracle. And it’s very special. For all the angst and fear that comes with life, there is so so much beauty. I wanted to share that with a person, a new person who would have the ability to see the world like I do (since we share genes, my hope is some of that comes along with it).
Can you elaborate on your angle here? If you’re implying that humans are incapable of choosing not to procreate, that seems pretty obviously incorrect, given the vast numbers of people who make that choice. Am I interpreting your comment incorrectly?
>Something tells me that this is going to hmmm... auto-regulate in no time.
That voice misleads you. There are things that can be altered via evolution, and many that aren't - or over such a timescale that it practically doesn't matter. For another example, take a look at the topic of suicide. If it would work in the way that this evil little voice implies, we wouldn't even have heard about a single case.
Another angle to consider is not taking everything at face value, and also separating the contemplation of something from agreeing or supporting it. There's something to be gained from exposing oneself to a wide variety of topics, thoughts and experiences, no matter how outlandish they seem at first. And you'll find that you are free to distance yourself from the undesirable thing, exactly as free as before. But if it leaves a mark, you can learn something new, which can't happen without the experience.
> separating the contemplation of something from agreeing or supporting it
I don't take life advice from people whom I don't trust; it's just too risky. If you have a strong broad argument up your sleeve, it might work better than the "evil" voice.
Yes, let's simply delete the evolution from the model, just leave the self-replication.
So your argument is that, while individual humans are capable of choosing not to procreate, humanity as a whole is incapable.
Sure, but that doesn’t seem to contradict anything in the original comment you were replying to. Just because every single human doesn’t abide by a code of ethics, it doesn’t mean we should abandon ethics entirely imo.
Are you the kind of person who ignores the moral arguments against eating meat by saying "others aren't going to do it"?
I don't understand the criticism. This is an argument in practical ethics; it doesn't matter how unpalatable the conclusion. It took 300 years for people to catch up the utilitarianism arguments Bentham was making in favor of gay rights (for example).
I often pose the philosophical thought experiment: if you had a button that could end human existence instantly, killing everyone with zero suffering, should you use it?
Assuming that you give credence to the idea that brain emulation technology will emerge before AGI you may be interested in the 2016 book The Age of Em. The author has a pretty vivid imagination about the commercial applications of brain emulation technologies in similar forms to that which the OP article and it's links describe but the book seemed to have, at the time I first read it, an unusual sense of optimism about the rule of law prevailing in future labour relations.
It's still an interesting read a few years later but it definitely needs a follow up.
>Coming to horrifying conclusions, by the way, isn't an intrinsically evil thing for an algorithm to do. It's just an algorithm. The problem comes when a human starts taking the algorithm's evil recommendations seriously, and acting on them
Here's another take on "creating a person solely to do some work": I believe it can be done in a humane way. Say, generate (or use a mind scan of) a programmer who loves their craft (as in, used to dream "if I only didn't have to go to work, I'd use all the time for my hobby projects").
Solution: put them in a simulated environment running at a higher than normal rate. Then, from their standpoint, it would be e.g. two 8-hour workdays per week, with the remaining 5 spent on (simulated) sailing/hiking/DIY/having fun with virtual concubines, you name it. These conditions could be legally mandated.
Actually I completely honestly would, and I'm confused that people wouldn't. That frog would hop off to lead a bleak, short, meaningless existence if I don't turn it into a person. Even if I wave the wand and make it human then fully abandon it, it'd still be a better outcome overall for a sentient being.
Why is a frog's life more bleak and meaningless than a human's life? We can't understand animals' thoughts, but that doesn't mean they don't have them.
A frog spends its time chilling in a pond and swimming all day. People pay good money for vacations where they can do exactly that. Sounds like a good life to me.
If I was a frog and you turned me into a homeless guy who has to go get a job at an Amazon warehouse to afford food, I'd use my newfound intellectual capacity to plot revenge on you and everyone you love.
Ridiculous. A homeless guy is going to have a way easier and more comfortable life than a frog
He can just hang out in a makeshift shelter and eat whatever free food he finds. He'll be in way less danger at any given time than a frog would be, with a vastly longer and more fulfilling life ahead of him.
The issue is that he's not going to be comparing his current circumstances to a frog, but to other humans ofc, by which metric he's probably very badly off. I doubt our stereotypical homeless person is going to find their life very fulfilling even if it is longer than a frog's.
I mean, just think how you would react if you found yourself in dire straits and someone told you "hey don't worry, at least you are not at risk of being eaten by a bird" That would be a ridiculous argument no?
When I visited Calcutta in the early 1980s, I saw limbless lepers strewn in the gutters like trash, covered in flies. I guess passersby did give them some free food or a couple of coins from time to time — but they were so despondent they barely raised their heads.
They mind it about as much as we do, judging by how hard they try to avoid it. It's silly to assume we're so different from animals that we're the only ones who don't like pain and death.
>They mind it about as much as we do, judging by how hard they try to avoid it
If there's an example of something trying hard to avoid it that's clearly incapable of minding anything, then you cannot establish a certain link between the capacity of minding it and trying to avoid it
Interesting. Now suppose some advanced alien had the power to advance _you_ to his level of sentience , thus cutting you off from everything you have known and loved, including your family.
Maybe. With a human being there’s an issue of consent. I don’t believe frogs are intelligent enough to be able to give informed consent, but for people that would be an issue. But setting aside the issue of consent, then yes.
(Caveat: I don’t believe this hypothetical is possible anyway. I am of the opinion that there is a dividing line in sentience beyond which improvements are possible but are more like upgrades than something more radical. There’s a phase change between sentience and non-sentience, but no further ohase changes to be had (I think))
Depending on what you mean by "fully abandoning it" that doesn't seem to track with humans being loss-averse as has been shown in (I believe) many psychological studies. Meaning most people vastly prefer remaining at a low level than to even lose a tiny bit. The fate of a frog becoming human and then being discarded shortly afterwards would be judged to be much more terrible by most people than the frog never becoming human in the first place.
Well that sounds like a moral philosophy that is alien, unappealing, and downright evil in its consequences. I mean, by that exact logic—if you truly believe it—you should be out euthanizing homeless people as a net win.
Every human life has value. There is no instance where I would value the life of a frog over the life of a human being. By logical consequence, I should always prefer one more human over one more frog. QED.
We may be talking past each other and I don't follow the part about euthanasia you lay out at all.
My point is that it would be vastly more cruel to turn a frog into a human, let them live a little and then abandon them to fend for themselves after they've outlived their usefulness to me (which is how I understood your point above) than to leave the frog alone entirely. By turning them into a human you have acquired a degree of responsibility for their well being which I would argue you can't shirk under normal circumstances. (C.f. making babies.)
This logic hinges on the assumptions that 1) humans have a higher state of consciousness than animals (which might be debatable in certain cases, ok) and 2) that a frog is indifferent towards its current state of existence because it doesn't know any better.
Lastly, you write "every human life has value" but in that thought experiment in the OP, they are not humans so far so that logic doesn't hold. Just because you have the ability to elevate/create life of a higher consciousness, absolutely does not mean that you have to do so IMO and that it can be downright inhumane to do so. (Again, babies, contraception, abortions etc.)
You say that because you're a human. If you were a frog, I bet you'd value frogs' lives more than humans. Why do you think it's your place to change others' lives into whatever form you personally prefer?
One way to have folks realize some of what they believed was impossible to measure is to run a thought experiment: what if one were to clone the org; between a control group and the other, what would X look like?
Where X could be something like employee engagement or the like--something nebulous that could be made concrete, or to reduce uncertainty.
> There is no button which can be pushed to create a new human being; there never will be.
I wouldn't say "never." We can push a button and create a new piece of art with stochastic uniquenesses. Maybe one day we can push a button and create a whole "AI" with all the random traits that come with being a human. I can imagine the value, and people tend to ignore the horrifying nature of things when there's value.
Nearly till the end I thought it was a metaphor for having kids...
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Ultimately this is a metaphysical question: What does it mean to be human as opposed to merely a digital model of a human?
Martin Buber wrote "I and Thou" about how "we may address existence in two ways:"
> The attitude of the "I" towards an "It", towards an object that is separate in itself, which we either use or experience.
> The attitude of the "I" towards "Thou", in a relationship in which the other is not separated by discrete bounds.
> One of the major themes of the book is that human life finds its meaningfulness in relationships. In Buber's view, all of our relationships bring us ultimately into relationship with God, who is the Eternal Thou.
As a hard sci-fi fan I feel that a lot of modern sci-fi is really a kind of sci-fi-flavored fantasy (I'm talking about written sci-fi, not TV/Movies.) Which is fine for entertainment value, don't get me wrong. It's just that without a deeper metaphysical grounding there's not a lot to think about, eh? With hard sci-fi you can at least pretend that you're exploring the possible consequences of actual scientific advances. But with e.g. the Acevedo Álvarez image it's up to the author if the instances of the image are people or things, "I" or "It", and to decide what that means.
This is coming out more critical than I intended. I like metaphysical fiction, and fantasy, and Star Trek, etc.
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The core question, when you really get down to the essence of intelligence and motivation, is, "What is good?"
It's an open-ended intelligence test.
(SPOILER ALERT, consider the character Teela Brown.)
There's an old story:
The farmer caught a wild horse and his neighbors all congratulated him on his good fortune, but he just said "Hmm."
His son tried to ride the horse and it threw him and he broke his arm, and all his neighbors consoled him for his misfortune, but he just said "Hmm."
The King came through drafting young men for the war but the farmer's son couldn't go because of his broken leg, and his neighbors all congratulated the farmer again on his good fortune, but he just said "Hmm."
Anyway, the story goes on like that for a few more reversals, each time a new event happens that changes the meaning of the previous event.
All well and good, but I don't quite see where OP takes his confidence from that there "will never be" a button to make up a human. Especially with the current progress in AI we're already seeing.
So as a joke we invented a fake employee with a fake name. I think his first name was Joe. We gave this person an email address and I made a voicemail recording for him.
When a time-waster was bugging us we'd tell them to contact Joe, "who is in charge of that" and provide the contact info. What started off as a joke ended up saving us a fuckton of time, effort, and hassle. For some reason Joe's incredibly upbeat and douchy sounding voicemail message was like manna from heaven for the relentless salespeople that refused to stop calling. It was an interesting social experiment of sorts. Joe was essentially a /dev/null bucket and never responded. But it worked.
This lasted for years and was really beneficial for us. Harder to pull off these days, but not impossible I imagine!