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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   27980 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 30, 2025

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"Incentives" are not the be-all and end-all of matters in life.

Sure, but it's unwise to dismiss them.

The police are incentivized to have high levels of crime to justify their salaries. You don't see them running coaching sessions on bank robbery.

Not incentivizing these things is the reason number one for why the police is run as a public service, instead of a private one.

Oncologists have "incentives" to keep you alive and cancer-ridden indefinitely to get that sweet insurance money. I know plenty, and I'm afraid that's not an accurate description of any of them.

Because the patients have power to just not go to the ones that would. Not to mention take revenge.

The kind of organization that would run mind uploads would likely be a cross between all of the above.

None of the pressures faced by any of these organisations would be applied to mind-upload-runners. It's like insisting there's be organizations that will keep lightbulbs on for absolutely no utility of their own.

Do you know why millions of people were kept in chattel slavery throughout history? Because there was a good business argument for it.

I feel like this makes the case against you than for you.

Besides, I'd like you to consider the possibility, however controversial it might sound, that people and systems sometimes do the right thing even when the first-order effects aren't to their "best interests".

Sure. When there is a common idea of what "the right thing" is in society, that people feel very strongly about, they will keep each other in check. It's a bit of an odd argument to make when the common conception of good is falling apart, but in this case specifically, how many people share your ideas of emulations being people?

In that case, I don't see the point of having this discussion at all.

You don't find it odd that the singularity has to be accepted as an article of faith for the discussion to continue?

Yes? The population of horses crashed during the Industrial Revolution, and has only recently recovered, driven almost entirely by recreational demand.

Right, so when emulation's labour will be like horse labour relative to chatGPT, and it will actively cost resources to keep them running, what does that analogy imply about the likely fate of mind-emulations?

Sure, but it's unwise to dismiss them.

Sure. And yet I invite you to show me how I'm "dismissing" them. All I've done is point out the competing incentives, which are regulatory, legal and ethical, which I expect to solve the problem.

Because the patients have power to just not go to the ones that would. Not to mention take revenge.

Are you familiar with the literature on the principal-agent problem? It's not remotely as simple as "just not go to the ones that would".

I will leave aside the fact that there's no physical law demanding that prospective mind uploads must use a single compute provider, and don't have the option to self-host either, and that there will likely be persons or organizations that can take "revenge" on their behalf.

PETA exists as an organization that takes "revenge" on the behalf of random animals, to set the floor rather low but not zero.

I feel like this makes the case against you than for you.

I feel like it doesn't, or I wouldn't have used that analogy. Please explain.

You don't find it odd that the singularity has to be accepted as an article of faith for the discussion to continue?

God. Leaving aside such loaded phrases as "article of faith", I think that it's very likely that we have some form of technological Singularity within our nominal life expectancy.

Even @FCfromSSC acknowledges the possibility of mind uploading, and presumably believes that the kind of rapid technological improvement that we colloquially call a Singularity is a requisite for us to live to see it. He even identifies with the potential mind upload. He however, believes that this is against his best interests.

My interests are to attempt to demonstrate why I think this is a mistake, or at the least, throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Consider that, from my perspective, an altruistic act.

If you don't think that mind uploads are a possibility, or that we won't live to see them, my interest in debating with you is minimal. What would the point even be? Alas, I'm here, because I suppose I have a sadomasochistic streak and will argue just about anything.

Right, so when emulation's labour will be like horse labour relative to chatGPT, and it will actively cost resources to keep them running, what does that analogy imply about the likely fate of mind-emulations?

Naively? Bad things. Less naively? Everything I've argued for so far.

But consider that it's not just the emulations that will be in the place of horses. If emulation are horses, then good old fashioned meat and bone humans would be closer to horse with a broken leg.

Being advocate for outcomes that don't literally kill all humans, I believe in attempting to steer the course of our technologies and laws in a direction that doesn't lead to this.

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