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PaperclipPerfector
5mo ago
(text post)
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Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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S: Hey dude. Wait, what's this? I thought you were going to wait for me before running it?
J: Oh yeah sorry, I forgot. I finally squashed that last bug on day six, and I started running it right away without thinking. This is just the boring stuff anyway, just simulated protozoa swimming and fucking, it will be about six months before people start building things and the cool stuff starts.
S: In your anthro-centric mind maybe, I was really looking forward to watching it kick off!
J: Ah, my bad. You can watch it now if you like, animals should be just about leaving the sea for the first time.
S: Yeah ok, I'll let you know if I see any people.
J: Seriously, that's half a year away. And while I did make sure their evolutionary pathway follows ours and they will look like us, proto-humans look more like apes, if you were hoping to watch them fuck.
S: Hht yeah, it was a joke. Besides you hired me to help you sell this thing to the world, so I don't have much else to do until it's ready for sale. And if we don't get a solution to The Problem from this we're all dead anyway.
Six months later.
S: How? How are they still stuck in that fucking desert? It's a big desert but it's been decades! There are adults in the tribe who have never seen grass!
J: Oh don't get me started man. I thought if I paired off the smartest ones into a tribe, genetics would get us to super intelligence faster, but I guess the effect isn't strong enough, they still spend their whole lives squabbling over minutia like everyone else. I even coded in a messenger who took the smartest one and laid out exactly what steps they needed to do to cheese the system, but they took the first ten and basically ignore the other 600.
S: You can interfere with the simulation? Then can you pick them up out of the desert? Or make it fertile again or something?
J: I could, but I don't think it's a good idea. They need to reach The Problem organically if we want them to solve it organically and some of them seem dependent on me just from my getting them away from the sun cult civilisation. I'm going to take a back-seat I think, and only interfere if they are in danger of getting wiped out.
S: Fair enough. I'm off to that Comp Sci conference you were supposed to speak at, I'll see you next week.
J: Yeah, try not to get us into more trouble with the press.
S: The press love me baby, that's why you hired me.
A week later.
S: Hey, how's it going?
J: Hey, good timing, I've got a new plan and I wanted to run it past someone.
S: Ohh, I thought I was too dumb to bounce ideas off of?
J: I didn't say that, I said you don't know enough about evolutionary programming to help me work out the algorithm.
S: You said I wasn't smart enough to help you work out the algorithm.
J: Oh fine, I'm sorry I didn't pick my words carefully enough. Do you want to hear my plan or not?
S: Hht, yeah sure.
J: Alright so I managed to keep our tribe going - actually they've flourished and populate a couple of cities now. But they aren't the strongest tribe in the simulation by a long shot - other tribes have even gotten empires going, and the latest empire actually looks like it might subsume our tribe.
S: Oh shit, that's not good! What are you thinking, some drastic interference? Wipe out the empire and give the tribe the spoils?
J: Ha, well I am thinking about something drastic, but in a very different direction. See, I think I fucked our guys a little by tribing them up like that - it's made them insular. And they're anxious too, for good reason - I've had to step in to save them a couple of times. And then I got to thinking - there are obviously smart people outside the tribe too, but we're missing out on that intelligence. We need a way to get those people involved too, so every smart person we can find works towards solving The Problem.
S: Yeah that makes sense. So what's the plan?
J: Ok we want to influence as many smart people as we can to work together, so the first thing I did was write down everything we want them to know.
S: More cheat codes? They didn't do the last ones!
J: Yeah no, no more cheat codes, that was probably a bad idea in the first place. What I'm doing is trying to make working together to solve The Problem their highest virtue. So it's stuff like 'other people think just like you do so if you want to know if someone will approve of what you are doing imagine someone doing it to you and how you'd react.' and 'if you spend all your time trying to make money or gain power you won't have time to spend on doing the only thing that matters - solving The Problem.'
S: Ah, nice, and you're going to send that bot you programmed in around to tell smart people this stuff?
J: Oh no, I can't use that thing - I rushed it and missed a bug in its evolutionary algorithm I think, because it just keeps growing eyes, it's covered in eyes now. If that thing told me to do anything I'd do the direct opposite.
S: So you're building another one?
J: Sort of. I didn't have time to figure out what I'd done wrong with the evolutionary algorithm again, so I built... A person. This guy. I coded all of the messages into him and I'm going to inject him into a random member of the tribe. Then when he grows up he'll be my messenger.
S: He... He looks like you.
J: He is me. Well, I'm him. In the simulation I will be him and he will be... Oh forget it, you're not going to be able to wrap your head around this.
S: Jesus, you are such a asshole.
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