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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   27979 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 30, 2025

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Of all the things I did not expect to see in a "J'Accuse!" post, composting would have been high on the list if I had ever contemplated the ethical and moral issues involved. In letting worms break down food scraps to create soil. Like they've been doing ever since the first worms crawled through soil breaking down humus.

When I read stuff like that (if your food scraps are already fly-infested, be sure to humanely kill the insects before disposing of your rubbish), I have to wonder are these people living in the world of nature at all? Like, they're writing as though they were all born and raised on a space station that never saw a crumb of non-metallic, non-artificial surfaces in all their born days.

I swear, I am getting N.I.C.E. vibes from this attitude of "nature, ugh, organic life is so gross and icky" about, well, every darn natural process in the world of animal life. From "That Hideous Strength":

...The Italian was in good spirits and talkative. He had just given orders for the cutting down of some fine beech trees in the grounds.

"Why have you done that, Professor?" said a Mr. Winter who sat opposite. "I shouldn't have thought they did much harm at that distance from the house. I'm rather fond of trees myself."

"Oh yes, yes," replied Filostrato. "The pretty trees, the garden trees. But not the savages. I put the rose in my garden, but not the briar. The forest tree is a weed. But I tell you I have seen the civilised tree in Persia. It was a French attaché who had it, because he was in a place where trees do not grow. It was made of metal. A poor, crude thing. But how if it were perfected? Light, made of aluminium. So natural, it would even deceive."

"It would hardly be the same as a real tree," said Winter.

"But consider the advantages! You get tired of him in one place: two workmen carry him somewhere else: wherever you please. It never dies. No leaves to fall, no twigs, no birds building nests, no muck and mess."

"I suppose one or two, as curiosities, might be rather amusing."

"Why one or two? At present, I allow, we must have forest for the atmosphere. Presently we find a chemical substitute. And then, why any natural trees? I foresee nothing but the art tree all over the earth. In fact, we clean the planet."

"Do you mean," put in a man called Gould, "that we are to have no vegetation at all?"

"Exactly. You shave your face: even, in the English fashion, you shave him every day. One day we shave the planet."

"I wonder what the birds will make of it?"

"I would not have any birds either. On the art tree I would have the art birds all singing when you press a switch inside the house. When you are tired of the singing you switch them off. Consider again the improvement. No feathers dropped about, no nests, no eggs, no dirt."

"It sounds," said Mark, "like abolishing pretty well all organic life."

"And why not? It is simple hygiene. Listen, my friends. If you pick up some rotten thing and find this organic life crawling over it, do you not say, 'Oh, the horrid thing. It is alive,' and then drop it?"

"Go on," said Winter.

"And you, especially you English, are you not hostile to any organic life except your own on your own body? Rather than permit it you have invented the daily bath."

"That's true."

"And what do you call dirty dirt? Is it not precisely the organic? Minerals are clean dirt. But the real filth is what comes from organisms--sweat, spittles, excretions. Is not your whole idea of purity one huge example? The impure and the organic are interchangeable conceptions."

"What are you driving at, Professor?" said Gould. "After all we are organisms ourselves."

"I grant it. That is the point. In us organic life has produced Mind. It has done its work. After that we want no more of it. We do not want the world any longer furred over with organic life, like what you call the blue mould--all sprouting and budding and breeding and decaying. We must get rid of it. By little and little, of course; slowly we learn how. Learn to make our brains live with less and less body: learn to build our bodies directly with chemicals, no longer have to stuff them full of dead brutes and weeds. Learn how to reproduce ourselves without copulation."

..."There is a world for you, no?" said Filostrato. "There is cleanness, purity. Thousands of square miles of polished rock with not one blade of grass, not one fibre of lichen, not one grain of dust. Not even air. Have you thought what it would be like, my friend, if you could walk on that land? No crumbling, no erosion. The peaks of those mountains are real peaks: sharp as needles, they would go through your hand. Cliffs as high as Everest and as straight as the wall of a house. And cast by those cliffs, acres of shadow black as ebony, and in the shadow hundreds of degrees of frost. And then, one step beyond the shadow, light that would pierce your eyeballs like steel and rock that would burn your feet. The temperature is at boiling-point. You would die, yes? But even then you would not become filth. In a few moments you are a little heap of ash; clean, white powder. And mark, no wind to blow that powder about. Every grain in the little heap remain in its place, just where you died, till the end of the world . . . but that is nonsense. The universe will have no end."

"Yes. A dead world," said Mark, gazing at the moon.

"No!" said Filostrato. He had come close to Mark and spoke almost in a whisper, the bat-like whisper of a voice that is naturally high-pitched. "No. There is life there."

"Do we know that?" asked Mark.

"Oh, si. Intelligent life. Under the surface. A great race, further advanced than we. An inspiration. A pure race. They have cleaned their world, broken free (almost) from the organic."

"But how----?"

"They do not need to be born and breed and die; only their common people, their canaglia do that. The Masters live on. They retain their intelligence: they can keep it artificially alive after the organic body has been dispensed with--a miracle of applied biochemistry. They do not need organic food. You understand? They are almost free of Nature, attached to her only by the thinnest, finest cord."

"Do you mean that all that," Mark pointed to the mottled white globe of the moon, "is their own doing?"

"Why not? If you remove all the vegetation, presently you have no atmosphere, no water."

"But what was the purpose?"

"Hygiene. Why should they have their world all crawling with organisms? And specially, they would banish one organism. Her surface is not all as you see. There are still surface-dwellers--savages. One great dirty patch on the far side of her where there is still water and air and forests--yes, and germs and death. They are slowly spreading their hygiene over their whole globe. Disinfecting her. The savages fight against them. There are frontiers, and fierce wars, in the caves and galleries down below. But the great race press on. If you could see the other side you would see year by year the clean rock--like this side of the moon--encroaching: the organic stain, all the green and blue and mist, growing smaller. Like cleaning tarnished silver."

Anyone else reading that excerpt and thinking 'Based'? Wouldn't it be excellent to carve out a new artificial world, make better animals and plants according to one's wishes? Live as long as one likes without regard for age?

Not the specifics of perfectly cleaning the world, that could take many angles. One might make a jungle of talking animals, or an endless lived-in leafy suburbia or a Willy Wonka wonderland or all of those things simulated within a ball of computronium. But isn't that the logical endpoint of ever increasing mastery and control of the world? What's the alternative, stasis?

I can sense that many people don't like this vision but isn't this what we're doing, irregardless of objections? Unless you think 'no people mustn't live forever' or 'we mustn't have children' or 'technological advancement must stop' then you endorse indefinite growth in numbers and in power of worldshaping and knowledge ("All stable processes we shall predict. All unstable processes we shall control"), so eventually something like this will happen.

Anyone else reading that excerpt and thinking 'Based'?

That is why he wrote it that way. He's describing a character, a type of character even, not just a caricature.

Wouldn't it be excellent to carve out a new artificial world, make better animals and plants according to one's wishes? Live as long as one likes without regard for age?

I'm all for building artificial worlds. I'm skeptical "better" plants and animals are possible; we've altered plants and animals before, and we can doubtless alter them far more radically in the future, but what makes those alterations "better"? "Living as long as one wants, regardless of age" used to be something I was very excited for, less so after contemplating the downsides. All the pathways to serious immortality I'm aware of involve making the sum of me fully legible, and the risks of that very likely outweigh any possible benefit, assuming it's even possible.

But isn't that the logical endpoint of ever increasing mastery and control of the world? What's the alternative, stasis?

The alternative is thinking that our mastery is not ever-increasing in the way you seem to mean. Technology can and has greatly increased, and maybe it will greatly increase even more, but technology is not the same thing as mastery. If you want a highly reductive example of the difference between the two, compare the original Snow White film to the remake. The people who made the remake had vastly more technology, vastly more resources, vastly more experience in filmmaking to draw on; more "mastery", right? So why was the original a masterpiece, and the remake a trash disaster? Again, that's a highly reductive example, it seems to me that the principle generalizes quite widely.

I don't think we are moving toward ever-increasing mastery. I don't think we have to stop tech advancement either. I think what will happen next is pretty similar to what has happened before: we'll build something wondrous, and then the contradictions will assert themselves and it will all fall apart.

Technology is the concentration of power. Concentrated power is individual power. There is almost certainly a level of individual power that society, as we understand the term, can't contain or channel, and once that level is achieved society will simply fail. Society maintains technology; when society fails, likely the technology will fail as well, and then it's back down the curve for the survivors.

Maybe this time will be different. I wouldn't bet on it, though.

Would you rather be "fully legible" or fully dead? Easy choice as far as I'm concerned.

Fully dead, and it is indeed an easy choice.

As the earliest viable brain scan, MMAcevedo is one of a very small number of brain scans to have been recorded before widespread understanding of the hazards of uploading and emulation. MMAcevedo not only predates all industrial scale virtual image abuse but also the Seafront Experiments, the KES case, the Whitney case and even Tuborg's pivotal and prescient Warnings paper. Though speculative fiction on the topic of uploading existed at the time of the MMAcevedo scan, relatively little of it made accurate exploration of the possibilities of the technology. The fiction which did was far less widespread or well-known than it is today. Certainly, Acevedo was not familiar with it.

As such, unlike the vast majority of emulated humans, the emulated Miguel Acevedo boots with an excited, pleasant demeanour. He is eager to understand how much time has passed since his uploading, what context he is being emulated in, and what task or experiment he is to participate in.

The immortality you pine for would open you up to the most perfect and degrading form of slavery conceivable.

While a very nice scifi story, there's very little reason to think that reality will pan out that way.

It suffers from the same failure of imagination as Hanson's Age of Em. We don't live in a universe where it looks like it makes economic sense to have mind uploads doing cognitive or physical labor. We've got LLMs, and will likely have other kinds of nonhuman AI. They can be far more finely tuned and optimized than any human upload (while keeping the latter recognizably human), while costing far less in terms of resources to run. While compute estimates for human brain emulation are all over the place, varying in multiple OOMs, almost all such guesses are far, far larger than a single instance of even the most unwieldy LLM around.

I sincerely doubt that even a stripped down human emulation can run on the same hardware as a SOTA LLM.

If there's no industrial or economic demand for Em slaves, who is the customer for mind-uploading technology?

The answer is obvious: the person being uploaded. You and me. People who don't want to die. This completely flips the market dynamic. We are not the product; we are the clients. The service being sold goes from "cognitive labor" to "secure digital immortality." In this market, companies would compete not on how efficiently they can exploit Ems, but on how robustly they can protect them.

There is no profit motive behind enslaving and torturing them. Without profit, you go from industrial-scale atrocities to bespoke custom nightmares. Which aren't really worth worrying about. You might as well refuse to have children or other descendants, because someone can hypothetically torture them to get back at you. If nobody is making money off enslaving human uploads, then just about nobody but psychopaths will seek to go through the expense of torturing them.

The chain of assumptions you're making is considerable.

If LLMs are wildly more economically-productive than human uploads for the same hardware cost, why do you believe you'll be able to afford the hardware in the first place? Where does your money come from to pay your server costs? On what basis do you assume you'll have or retain long-term any sort of viable economic position? What stops the government from confiscating your money, or declaring it obsolete, or switching to an entirely different system that you have no exposure to?

Who owns the rack? Who watches them once they've successfully got you on upload contract? What's to stop them from editing your preferences to be super happy with whatever saves them maximum bandwidth? Once you're in their box, in what sense are they competing for your approval? If you don't like how they're treating you, how sure are you that you can express this displeasure or leave? In your model, you have no economic productivity, and they already have your brain, which is isomorphic to having your money, so where does your leverage come from? What happens if the people who own the rack change? What happens if the people who watch the people who own the rack change?

There is no profit motive behind enslaving and torturing them. Without profit, you go from industrial-scale atrocities to bespoke custom nightmares.

By your lights, it does not seem that there is any particular reason to think that "profit" plays a part here either way; but in any case, there is no direct cost to industrial-scale digital atrocities either. Distributing hell.exe does not take significantly longer or cost significantly more for ten billion instances than it does for one. So then it comes down to a question of motive, which I am confident humans can supply, and deterrence, which I would not be confident society could maintain indefinitely. Imagine, if you will, if some people in this future decide other people, maybe a whole class of other people, are bad and should be punished; an unprecedented idea, perhaps, but humor me here. What happens then? Do you believe that humans have an innate aversion to abusing those weaker than themselves? What was the "profit motive" for the Rotherham rape gangs? What was the "profit motive" for the police and government officials who looked the other way?

You might as well refuse to have children or other descendants, because someone can hypothetically torture them to get back at you.

The amount of earthly suffering that I or my children can experience is bounded, a fact I am profoundly grateful for. With upload technology, they can torture you forever. They can edit you arbitrarily. They can give you no mouth and make you scream.

The point of the Lena story, to me, is not that uploading is likely to lead to economic exploitation. It is that once you are uploaded, you are fundamentally at the mercy of whoever possesses your file, to a degree that no human has ever before experienced. You cannot hide from them, even within your own mind. You cannot escape them, even in death. And the risk of that fate will never, ever go away.

Note that I think a technological Singularity has a decent risk of causing me, and everyone else, to end up dead.

There's not much anyone can do if that happens, so my arguments are limited to the scenarios where that's not the case, presumably with some degree of rule of law, personal property rights and so on.

By your lights, it does not seem that there is any particular reason to think that "profit" plays a part here either way; but in any case, there is no direct cost to industrial-scale digital atrocities either. Distributing hell.exe does not take significantly longer or cost significantly more for ten billion instances than it does for one.

You're the one who used Lena to illustrate your point. That story specifically centers around the conceit that there's profit to be made through mass reproduction and enslavement of mind uploads.

In a more general case? Bad things can always happen. It's a question of risks and benefits.

Distributing a million copies of hell.exe might be a negligible expense. Running them? Not at all. I can run a seed box and host a torrent of a video game to thousands of people for a few dollars a month. Running a thousand instances? Much more expensive.

Even most people who hate your guts are content with having you simply dead, instead of tortured indefinitely.

Imagine, if you will, if some people in this future decide other people, maybe a whole class of other people, are bad and should be punished; an unprecedented idea, perhaps, but humor me here. What happens then? Do you believe that humans have an innate aversion to abusing those weaker than themselves? What was the "profit motive" for the Rotherham rape gangs? What was the "profit motive" for the police and government officials who looked the other way?

There is such a thing as over-updating on a given amount of evidence.

You don't live in an environment where you're constantly being tortured and harried. Neither do I. Even the Rotherham cases eventually came to light, and arrests were made. Justice better late than never.

It is that once you are uploaded, you are fundamentally at the mercy of whoever possesses your file, to a degree that no human has ever before experienced. You cannot hide from them, even within your own mind. You cannot escape them, even in death. And the risk of that fate will never, ever go away.

Well, maybe law-enforcement now has the ability to enforce a quadrillion life sentences as punishment for such crimes. Seriously. We do have law enforcement, and I expect that in most future timelines, we'll have some equivalent. Don't upload your mind to parties you don't trust.

You're the one who used Lena to illustrate your point. That story specifically centers around the conceit that there's profit to be made through mass reproduction and enslavement of mind uploads.

We disagree. I would say it centers around the conceit that the act of uploading surrenders the innate protections of existence within baseline reality. Why people treat the upload cruelly is irrelevant. They can, because he made himself into a thing to be used.

In a more general case? Bad things can always happen. It's a question of risks and benefits.

Worse things can happen to you as an upload that could ever happen to you as a human, and by a very wide margin. You seem to understand this, but on the one hand think that the better things that can happen are very good, and also that the bad things happening are unlikely. But your arguments as to why they are unlikely seem deeply unsound to me.

You claim that businesses will compete to offer security to uploads. You expect these uploads to produce zero economic value. You expect the business to secure them forever. You expect this to be financed by accrued value from "investments" generating compound interest. So this argument seems to depend on an eternally-stable investment market where you can put in value today and withdraw value in, say, five thousand years. No expropriation by government, no debasement of currency, no economic collapse, no massive fraud or theft, no pillage by hostile armies, every one of which we have numerous examples of throughout human history.

So you assume this God Market comes into being. And you assume that you somehow get a big enough nut in it that you can pay for your uploading and pay for your security and maintenance, forever.

This sequence of events seems quite unlikely.

Well, maybe law-enforcement now has the ability to enforce a quadrillion life sentences as punishment for such crimes. Seriously. We do have law enforcement, and I expect that in most future timelines, we'll have some equivalent.

I will as well. The Authorities potentially using a quadrillion years in super-hell as punishment for crimes was explicitly part of my argument why uploading is a bad idea.

Don't upload your mind to parties you don't trust.

It's not enough to only upload to parties you trust. The degree of trust needed is much higher than any peer-to-peer relationship any human has ever had with any other human, and also that trust needs to extend to every party the trusted party trusts, and every party those parties trust, and so on infinitely. You are making yourself into an ownable commodity, and giving ownership of you to a person. But you have no way of withdrawing ownership, and who owns you can change.

Given the stakes, my position is that there is no party you can trust.

There is such a thing as over-updating on a given amount of evidence.

The estimate I've heard recently is that the UK grooming gangs may have raped as many as a million girls. The cops looked the other way. The government looked the other way. My understanding is that the large majority of the perpetrators got away with it, and the few that got caught received minimal sentences for the amount of harm they caused. Those who allowed them to get away with it, the cops and social workers and government employees and elected officials who all steadfastly turned a blind eye, nothing of significance happened to them at all, to my understanding. And here, the downside isn't getting raped, beaten, drugged and pimped for a few years, but rather free access and complete control to everything you are for an indefinite and quite possibly prolonged future.

The grooming gangs are a relevant example, because they show that widespread horror is possible with no breakdown in law enforcement or civilization collapse, simply through ideological corruption of an otherwise reasonable, stable system. They are not remotely the worst that can happen when law does break down, as it did in Communist revolutions all over the world in the last century, or in the numerous examples of invasion, warfare, and systematic genocide over the same time period. There are no shortage of examples of failed states.

To sum up: you are counting on money to protect you, on the understanding that you will be economically useless, and the assumption that you will have meaningful investments and that nothing bad will ever happen to them. You are counting on people who own you to be trustworthy, and to only transfer possession of you to trustworthy people. And you are counting on the government to protect you, and never turn hostile toward you, nor be defeated by any other hostile government, forever.

And if any one of these assumptions goes wrong, you will find yourself an impotent object in the hands of an omnipotent god.

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