domain:alakasa.substack.com
HereAndGone
1hr ago
It's the religious impulse turned in on itself. There are people who are naturally compassionate and charitable, and there are people who are naturally scrupulous and tormented by conscience, and there are people who like increasingly abstract thought experiments far divorced from any practical application.
And in the old days, their impulses would have led them to be like this man. There was an understood social framework around feeding the hungry, helping those in need, alms giving, and doing good works.
But that's gone by the wayside now, so what happens to those impulses that still persist but don't have the same socially cohesive and universal channels to divert them? If you get hung up on the likes of EA (sorry, EA, to always be kicking this philosophy but it does seem to get diverted very damn easily from 'cure the sick' to 'we must all network and get well-paying jobs so we can donate so that we can hold conferences about existential risk, sorry sick people but your present suffering is nothing compared to the potential suffering of potential future billions if we do the calculations right') and thus you need more extreme forms of do-gooding to satisfy your inflamed intellect. Ordinary "give to local church donations for the needy, help out in a soup kitchen", etc. actions are not good enough because any ignorant normie can do that, plus your philosophy has tidily proven that helping those you know near to you is racist and elitist and much less effective and efficient and not worth doing.
So you get hung up on shrimp and plants and 'suffering is bad' (which most people will agree on) 'hence we must wipe out all organic life, starting with every single wild animal, because their natural lives where we don't interfere with them are just horrible - nasty, brutish and short like the guy said' (which most people will think is freakin' extreme and slightly nuts).
Ah yes, the long rich democratic tradition of the 20 years between the World Wars, that were imposed by Woodrow Wilson's deranged fantasies, and managed to revert to authoritarianism even within that short timespan.
What is this meant to be a reference to please? Czechoslovakia? Because there was no reversion to authoritarianism in that case.
The attachment to democracy was so short that we were seriously debating if it's not better to take the Asian Tiger route, and only implement democracy after authoritarian reforms.
The Asian Tiger route was a strictly Southeast Asian (Confucian) phenomenon in the specific context of the Cold War and facilitated by generous and targeted American capital investment and the proto version of offshoring. None of that applied to Eastern Europe after 1989.
It can work if the stars align just right, but has the tendency of taking it's necessary conditions (like everybody having roughly the same values) for granted. The moment these conditions are not met the democracy enjoyers themselves will start begging for it's end, arresting opposition candidates, and seriously considering the banning of political parties, for the high crime of people voting the wrong way.
It was all a long-term consequence of German 'reunification' (the annexation of the former GDR into an unchanged federal state structure) being a complete shitshow which incidentally the Americans played no part in.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1hr ago
Buddhist or Shinto or something - I don't know, and I assume the creators of the ad didn't know either
I would assume Jainism! They sweep the ground in front of themselves as they walk, and wear facemasks to avoid inhaling bugs. You beat me to it by about 15 minutes.
HereAndGone
1hr ago
We will manage to rethink, remeasure, and find additional ways of suffering. People always have. Today, plants do not feel "pain", but tomorrow, pain may not a prerequisite for suffering.
I keep quoting this and Chesterton meant it as rollicking satire, but somebody is always trying to make it come true:
Then there was the opposite school. There was Mr. Edward Carpenter, who thought we should in a very short time return to Nature, and live simply and slowly as the animals do. And Edward Carpenter was followed by James Pickie, D.D. (of Pocohontas College), who said that men were immensely improved by grazing, or taking their food slowly and continuously, after the manner of cows. And he said that he had, with the most encouraging results, turned city men out on all fours in a field covered with veal cutlets. Then Tolstoy and the Humanitarians said that the world was growing more merciful, and therefore no one would ever desire to kill. And Mr. Mick not only became a vegetarian, but at length declared vegetarianism doomed ("shedding," as he called it finely, "the green blood of the silent animals"), and predicted that men in a better age would live on nothing but salt. And then came the pamphlet from Oregon (where the thing was tried), the pamphlet called "Why should Salt suffer?" and there was more trouble.
There is research about plant reactions to stimuli, but there's always that one person who can't resist taking it further
František Baluška is also very good at making inconceivable connections. Baluška, a plant cell biologist at University of Bonn, has for some time now been of the opinion that plants are intelligent—after all, they can process information and make decisions. But do plants have consciousness? That takes the discussion to a whole different level. If we could prove that plants have consciousness, we would have to radically change the way we interact with them, because we’d find ourselves facing the same kinds of issues that we face with factory farming in conventional agriculture.
Baluška, together with colleagues from around the world, including Stefano Mancuso from the University of Florence, has come a little closer to answering the question about plant consciousness. Baluška and his colleagues sedated plants that feature moving parts, such as Venus flytraps. These plants catch their prey in a trap that snaps shut as soon as insects touch trigger hairs on the inner side of their double-lobed leaves. The two sides of the leaf fold together in a flash, capturing the insect between them, and the plant then digests its prey. The anesthetics the scientists used, which included some that are used on people, deactivated electric activity in the plants so that the traps no longer reacted when they were touched. Sedated peas showed similar changes in behavior. Their tendrils, which usually move in all directions as they slowly feel their way through their surroundings to find supporting structures to grow on, stopped searching and started to spiral on the spot. After the plants broke the narcotics down, they resumed their normal behavior.
Some kind-hearted people have now got as far as worrying about bees, and shrimp. Bacteria will indeed be next. Then plants. How can we be so speciesist and arrogant about our artificial hierarchy imposed on the natural world? And of course there is chatter about "are machines sentient, is AI self-aware or could become self-aware?" so we're working our way slowly but steadily towards "do rocks think?"
Right now I can afford to laugh at researchers solemnly "sedating peas" and checking do their little tendrils twitch then writing up the results, but some day in the not-too-distant future, it may be no laughing matter. We may have to try can we live on salt (until the "thinking rocks" set argue about "why should Salt suffer?")
naraburns
nihil supernum
1hr ago
Adelstein ("Bentham's Bulldog") is a gifted philosophy grad student (I think--he was last year identified as a second year philosophy student in a well-regarded program). It's very impressive that he has multiple publications in top journals as a student. But his particular gift seems to be finding implausible positions and developing intuition pumps for them while neatly evading all the reasons why they are, even so, implausible. This is a good way to garner notoriety in the field. It is, not coincidentally, how Peter Singer really got famous. It is arguably why Jeremy Bentham is famous.
But I have to say that it is always disappointing to me when philosophers optimize for notoriety over the love of wisdom.
I think that all utilitarianism is mistaken, of course, because I am a contractualist who rejects aggregation. But Adelstein's take on veganism strikes me as aggressively, surely willfully obtuse--my priors are that it is more likely Adelstein is engaged in a kind of extended performance art, driven by the attention and notoriety he is accumulating, than that he is doing serious philosophy about the way the world really is. These are luxury beliefs par excellence--and maybe also anxieties of the sort that make people mentally ill. I guess I might be more willing to believe Adelstein was serious if I saw him walking around everywhere with a broom and facemask--and if he does, he's still wrong, but at least he's not performatively wrong.
BahRamYou
1hr ago
I feel like people take the wrong impression from those stories of historical roads covered in dung. Back then, all humans were a lot closer to nature so they were less grossed out by it. That dung was a sign of wealth. Animals were one of the most expensive things humans could owb, especially horses. In most societies, owning a horse made you a weslthy man. The manure was carefully collected and used for crop fertilizer.
It would have been mind blowing for most historical societies to see a European city with so many horses they cant even pick up all the dung. It would be like living in an oil field.
FtttG
1hr ago
although many vegans wouldn't consider me vegan because I eat oysters and honey
If you eat oysters, I don't even consider you vegetarian, never mind vegan. You're pescatarian, surely.
FtttG
1hr ago
On this topic, I have an (admittedly pedantic) pet peeve. The pro-vegan, animal rights movement often use the phrase "cruelty-free", referring to cruelty-free diets, cruelty-free lifestyles, cruelty-freee products etc. The idea is that anyone who eats meat or uses cosmetic products which were tested on animals is therefore complicit in cruelty, unlike people who don't do these things.
I accept that people living plant-based diets are complicit in less cruelty than people who eat meat. But they are not living cruelty-free lives: the amount of cruelty in which they are complicit is far from zero. Agricultural farmers still have to clear land to grow crops, which means exterminating the vermin occupying said land. (Maybe I've just reinvented the "no ethical consumption under capitalism" meme.)
When I was a kid I saw this funny ad. It shows this monk with a shaved head and flowing red robes (Buddhist or Shinto or something - I don't know, and I assume the creators of the ad didn't know either), who's a friend to all living creatures. He's walking home when he spots a ladybird on the pavement that he almost steps on - so he leans over to delicately pick it up and place it gently on the grass next to the pavement. Then when he gets home he's sitting on the toilet, and while he's going about his business he picks up the bottle of bleach next to it and reads that it kills 99.9% of bacteria in his toilet. With mounting horror, he realises the genocide he's unwittingly caused every time he squirts bleach down his toilet.
Funny ad, clever concept. But it got me thinking - where do you draw the line in determining which animals' welfare to care about? Are bacteria animals? If we're meant to avoid eating honey because it causes bees to suffer more than they otherwise would have, why not bacteria? Are antibiotics genocide?
(Also I know this is mean, but ever since I found out Bentham's Bulldog looks like this I've been unconsciously discounting his opinions in my head slightly.)
jake
2hr ago
and I think his claim to believe in God is one of those useful lies to the voter base rather than anything he sincerely believes in
By the way, and I should have said this back at Christmas, but alas. I'd say the probability of your assessment of Ramaswamy falsely professing belief is very high now. I won't go all the way, not because I mind admitting being wrong, you can treat this as my admission of being on the wrong side of assessing him, but because it's not my place to say on this whether someone believes what they say. "He's given adequate reason to doubt him," yes. I do think one of my arguments holds up, that a more competent actor would have found a way to say it without lying, because he dropped a few poorly chosen words on an issue and got himself banished to Ohio.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
2hr ago
and this approach is hinted at in a few other Pauline letters
Which passages do you have in mind?
Can you explain to me where?
Have sex on a day you know you are unlikely to make a new life - Seems unlikely this action would be bad too. Otherwise there would also be warnings against having sex while pregnant or post-menupause, and there aren't.
This reads, to me, like youre taking situations where non-conception is forseeable but not intended (pregnant, post-menopause), and arguing that its therefore ok with intent also.
The point of genitals is to have sexual intercourse.
The question is, what tells us that the sexual intercourse thats the point is exactly "ejaculation of a penis in a vagina" and not some related different concept with different boundaries? I think that would be very difficult to explain without tying it to the purpose of sexual intercourse. Im expecting something like "the evolutionary purpose of sexual intercourse is making babies, penis ejaculating in vagina is neccesary for that, therefore its nessecary to proper sexual intercourse".
Firing a gun can be done intentionally to kill people and for target practice/sport, etc.
Sexual intercourse can be done for making babies and for pair bonding and pleasure
Target practice generally still requires firing small ballistics. Pair bonding and pleasure dont require penis ejaculating in vagina. In fact, target practice doesnt always require them: there are "dry fire" drills to train the gross mechanics of handling the gun, and there are cartridge-shaped devices that make the gun shoot laser instead, to let you train things that wouldnt be safe with real bullets. Do you feel these violate the purpose of the gun? If no, why?
If you're wearing a condom, you aren't having sexual intercourse in the sense a Catholic defines it. The penis is not ejaculating in a vagina.
I think thats not how people use words, generally. "Penis ejaculating in vagina", as an ordinary english description, does not actually exclude using a condom. Your conclusion that it doesnt count does not derive from trying to apply that description, but from your knowledge of catholic ethics and what the answer is supposed to be. I think youve given a description that doesnt really describe your beliefs, and not noticed because its too intuitive for you.
Please notice that I have not once argued that contraceptives are wrong because it avoids conception
I know. Im arguing that your reasoning against typical methods of contraception doesnt actually work, and that something more like the above would be needed. And I dont mean "work" in the sense that I dont feel bound by it, I mean you yourself would not be able to figure out which methods are and arent allowed based on the reasons you give, if you didnt already know what the answer was supposed to be.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
2hr ago
One vibe I pick up from the modern vegans is that the anti-suffering ethics are the ethics of the future. That our great-grandchildren will look backwards and wonder how we ever stooped so low as to tolerate farming practice A or B. I don't doubt we'll find cost effective, technological solutions that will be accepted as moral improvements in the future. I am not opposed to those changes on principle. Increase shrimp welfare if you want, fine.
That's a vibe, and only a vibe, and only for now.
In the long run, it's a self-defeating philosophy. Reducing suffering is adaptive only so long as suffering is itself a proxy for maladaptive practices. Simple example: You don't eat, you starve, you suffer, you won't be very fit for any competition. But he point is increasing fitness, not reducing suffering itself. There are countless ways to take negative utilitarianism to absurd conclusions. An example thereof: You can't stop giving someone heroin because that would increase his suffering. Or: We all have to commit suicide right this instant, or ideally shut down the entire universe, to minimize suffering. It's ridiculous, but so is the entire philosophy.
“What do I care for your suffering?"
said a fictional character. Quite a lot, many people do...but as far as I care that's just post-Christian purity spiralling. But it's a dead end. Sorry for going all Adolf here, but in the long enough run different cultures, societies and philosophies do compete, and the less fit ones will be weeded out by natural selection. And man, is it not obvious how a negative utilitarian philosophy absolutely cripples a society? Turbo-pacifist Mennonites can survive so long as there are less-pacifist societies around that will host them, but anyone who takes negative utilitarianism seriously is just angling for self-destruction. It's a joke philosophy. "How about we take the proxy of suffering and turn it into our target metric?" is risible.
Is there anyone left on the Motte who seriously identifies as a negative utilitarian? I doubt it. Yes you can naively state that "less suffering is better than more suffering", but I would have to ask - yes, for myself and the people I care about, instinctively so, but still only as a proxy. "Why not shrimp welfare, doesn't hurt anyone.", one might say, and I could maybe take it seriously if it were followed up with a well-founded explanation of how suffering in shrimps releases stress hormones that dangerously reduce the meat quality. Beyond that, let them suffer if that's what it takes.
And I hope it's obvious that I'm not pro-suffering. I strongly reject any cruelty for cruelty's sake. But it seems obvious that suffering must be treated as a proxy metric, not a target metric. in itself.
I like bees. I try to carefully shoo them out the house along with the bumblebees and butterflies. They're cute and agreeable and I like to think of myself as someone who doesn't destroy needlessly. Wasps and moths and flies on the other hand I kill on sight. I could argue that this is in consequence to some utilitarian calculus in which the harm done by those animals in the house is greater than the harm I inflict on them, and maybe it is...but does it matter? They annoy me and do not please me, so they have to go. Am I now immoral? Unethical? Do I make the world worse?
Achilles glared at him and answered, "Fool, prate not to me about covenants. There can be no covenants between men and lions, wolves and lambs can never be of one mind, but hate each other out and out an through. Therefore there can be no understanding between you and me, nor may there be any covenants between us, till one or other shall fall
Animals kill animals all the time. Are the animals immoral? If the plants do indeed turn out to be capable of suffering and we decide to starve ourselves out of existence to fulfill some imaginary moral imperative, what purpose will that have served? I'm rambling wildly because I just cannot fathom how anyone ever can take negative utilitarianism seriously. With all the charity I can muster, no! it goes the wrong way, in every way! And even if one tried to steelman it as "reducing suffering is pragmatic and practical and has positive consequences by several other, more obviously useful metrics", then any such reasoning goes out of the window as soon as the negative utilitarian seriously brings up insect suffering. Insect suffering! How can that be anything other than clickbait? Fodder for the ultra-woke who are just in love with all things that get in the way of meaningful human activity?
Please, someone, come out as a negative utilitarian. Steelman it for me. Provide the charity I lack.
SerialStateLineXer
2hr ago
I finally finished Math Foundations 3 on Math Academy, a course north of 6 thousand xp
Interesting. It came to about 5k for me, possibly because it most of it was review for me, and I blew through it in under a month, consequently not getting many scheduled reviews.
I also finished Methods of Proof, which was interesting although it focused a lot more on integer factorization than I expected, and am now about 80% of the way though math for machine learning. The more complicated linear algebra material was a bit of a speed bump for me, as I had to go back and do some reviewing to get a better understanding of what was going on. I should be ready for their ML course when it comes out, and maybe even have time to finish up the parts of the LA => MVC => Stats sequence not covered in M4ML.
Find a bike shop or rental and borrow a ladies sit-up bike for a couple of hours, see what you think. Yes, they’re theoretically meant for girls, but they’re a lot more comfortable and more stable, and you can go from riding to standing safely in a fraction of a second just by lowering your feet. Plus you get a basket to put your stuff in :)
The idea that bicycling should involve spending hours in a weird tantric sex position mystifies me.
If the minds can't support themselves economically, they obvious incentive is to pull the plug on them, so you don't have to pay them UBI anymore.
"Incentives" are not the be-all and end-all of matters in life.
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.
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.
Then the incentive becomes: manipulate the emulations to sign away the rights to their investments, and then pull the plug.
The number of cemeteries that dig up their clients and sell them for parts is, to the best of my knowledge, small.
The number of investment firms and banks that snatch the fees of the recently departed to spend on their whims, is, as far as I'm aware, rather limited.
Cloud service providers don't, as a general rule, steal all your data and sell them to your competitors.
The kind of organization that would run mind uploads would likely be a cross between all of the above.
Do you know why millions of people were kept in chattel slavery throughout history? Because there was a good business argument for it. Even the most abusive sheikh in Qatar doesn't bus in dozens of kaffirs for the sole purpose of beating them up for the joy of it. The majority of people who hate you are more than content to end the matter with a bullet in your brain, and not to keep you around to torture indefinitely.
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". And perhaps we might have cops and politicians in some form to help even the scales.
I do not grant any claims of "the singularity" happening a single shred of legitimacy, unless it comes with solid supporting evidence.
In that case, I don't see the point of having this discussion at all.
Or are the horses we do keep there for our amusment?
Yes? The population of horses crashed during the Industrial Revolution, and has only recently recovered, driven almost entirely by recreational demand.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
3hr ago
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.
The basic idea is that you need intelligent high-agency people to win / get anything done, and so movements should try to appeal to such people rather than alienate them.
I don't even think the basic idea is wrong per-se, but the people putting it forward tend to insist, in a childish Joffrey Baratheoneque way, that they are the Elite Human Capital that needs to be appealed to, and so you must do their bidding, They also seem unaware that even if they were accepted as such, it would come with it's share of duties and responsibilities to their followers. I'd also quibble about the appeal / alienate thing, because the EHCs are very anxious about their status, and can be arm-twisted to do your movement's bidding.
OliveTapenade
3hr ago
I speculate that people who want to talk all day about haplotypes are too, well, boring to draw that much controversy. If you're very interested in the science of genetics there might be a good conversation there, but most people are not. Moreover, people who want to talk about that will probably learn that the Motte isn't a great place for deep dives into genetic science. That sort of conversation requires a lot of specialised knowledge that most Motters don't have.
By contrast, people who enjoy making edgy generalisations about this or that racial group seem like they're optimising more for drama and controversy, and this is a better place to get that. It's the culture war angle. Diving into the arcane complexities of genetic science is interesting, but it's not incendiary. It doesn't pick fights the way that its edgier cousin does.
Naturally get more of the latter type.
2rafa
3hr ago
Ukraine is vastly larger than Gaza and civilians were easily and quickly (and still are) evacuated well behind the front lines where the intense conflict occurs. In Gaza, neighboring countries refused to accept evacuations, and Hamas - unlike either army in Ukraine - is an insurgent force that doesn’t wear uniforms, doesn’t observe any rules of war, and hides in the civilian population.
If the Ukrainian military had melted into the civilian population in the occupied cities where they emerged, daily, from schools, residential homes, hospitals and so on to attack Russians, the Ukrainian civilian casualty rate would be much higher. As it happened, the sides are fighting a conventional war (one Hamas cannot afford to fight, and doesn’t wish to).
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
3hr ago
I never quite got that. What is "Elite Human Capital" about?
Enslaving human mind uploads is in a similar ballpark of eminently sensible economic decisions.
(...) What humans might have instead are UBI
If the minds can't support themselves economically, they obvious incentive is to pull the plug on them, so you don't have to pay them UBI anymore.
or pre-existing investments on which they can survive.
Then the incentive becomes: manipulate the emulations to sign away the rights to their investments, and then pull the plug.
Not necessarily. I think you're well aware of my concerns about automation-induced unemployment, with most if not all humans becoming economically unproductive. Mind uploads are unlikely to change that.
Yes, and I consider most of them to be poorly made, and unresponsive to the most basic criticisms.
Even small sums held before a Singularity could end up worth a fortune due to how red-hot the demand for capital would be
You can't start your criticism with "there's very little reason to think that reality will pan out that way.", and then say something like this. I do not grant any claims of "the singularity" happening a single shred of legitimacy, unless it comes with solid supporting evidence. I grant even less legitimacy to any claims about what will happen to pre-singularity investments, any such claims are pure fan-fic.
No. Because, in both scenarios, they're obsolete, and little that you can do to make mind uploads cheaper won't apply to normal AI, which already start at an advantage.
(...) Once again, if you have tractors, the market for horse-rustling falls through the bottom.
Then follow the logic of the analogy a bit further. Do we see massive horse farms where we devote insane amounts of resources for the horses amusement? Or are the horses we do keep there for our amusment?
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3hr ago
· Edited 3hr ago
2 or 3 from different users, explicit enough about what you claim to make up the "bailey" (including in particular language that is similar to your "scientifically correct means of organizing a society" quote), perhaps at +25 or more to back up your claim of being especially supported by this forum, with the responses and derisive responses to those posts you claim to exist below those posts.
Also, there should be at least something linking those posters to the "HBD" label, either explicitly or implicitly by way of some post where they display beliefs or preoccupations that are characteristic of that community (e.g. subpopulations of Nigeria). You can't just grab some old white supremacist off the metaphorical street and claim that he's actually representative of HBDers, as this would be pretty circular as a means to establish that your slander (that HBDers usually just amount to [garden-variety racial supremacists]; nobody is disputing that garden-variety racial supremacists exist) is not baseless.
Hard mode: No upper-caste Indian guys shopping around for frameworks to justify Indian caste society and their position in it.
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.
I don't eat diary or eggs though. Looks like there's a name for this. Ostrovegan?
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