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.
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.
[1] https://qntm.org/mmacevedo