domain:eigenrobot.substack.com
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
28m 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
54m 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
55m 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.
1hr 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
1hr ago
· Edited 1hr 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.
Supah_Schmendrick
1hr ago
Welp, that's outed me as an online far-right autist, I suppose. (tongue very much in cheek)
self_made_human
C'est la vie
1hr ago
I wouldn't call the history of every invention to be "very little reason".
I guess that's why, after the invention of the hamster wheel, we've got indentured slaves running in them to power our facilities. Enslaving human mind uploads is in a similar ballpark of eminently sensible economic decisions.
How do these emulations get the resources to pay the companies for the service of protection? Presumably they work, no?
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.
What humans might have instead are UBI or pre-existing investments on which they can survive. Even small sums held before a Singularity could end up worth a fortune due to how red-hot the demand for capital would be. They could spend this on backup copies of themselves if that wasn't a service governments provided from popular demand.
By getting more clients? If yes, why compete for the limited amount of clients, when you can just copy-paste them? We're already seeing a similar dynamic with meatsack humans and immigration, it strikes me as extremely naive to think it would happen less if we make it easier and cheaper.
So you happen to see an enormous trade in illegal horses, to replace honest local tractors in the fields? I suppose that's one form of "mule" hopping the borders. 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.
Slavery ensures profit, torture ensures compliance.
Well, it's an awful shame that we have pretty handy "slaves" already, in the form of ChatGPT and its descendants. Once again, if you have tractors, the market for horse-rustling falls through the bottom.
functor
1hr ago
Israel killed as many civilians in two months as Russians killed in 3.5 years of fighting against a far more competent opponent.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
1hr ago
Played around with Unreal physics a bit. Scripted some semi-random physical movement. Nothing big, but just about the first time I wanted to do something with Unreal and just got it done on the first try.
FistfullOfCrows
1hr ago
You joke, yet one of my oldest dreams is our geneediting capabilities to reach the state where we can produce a human/plant hybrid where basking in the sun actually feeds you.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1hr ago
While a very nice scifi story, there's very little reason to think that reality will pan out that way.
I wouldn't call the history of every invention to be "very little reason".
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.
How do these emulations get the resources to pay the companies for the service of protection? Presumably they work, no? How does a company make money? By getting more clients? If yes, why compete for the limited amount of clients, when you can just copy-paste them? We're already seeing a similar dynamic with meatsack humans and immigration, it strikes me as extremely naive to think it would happen less if we make it easier and cheaper.
There is no profit motive behind enslaving and torturing them.
Slavery ensures profit, torture ensures compliance.
While Israel and the US can't take an area the size of a municipality in Gaza against enemies with no resources Russia took the area the size of Denmark in a week against an enemy with 3x larger force.
“The world” is shrieking about modest civilian casualties in Gaza’s dense urban landscape, if the gloves were off the Star of David could be flying off (the remains) of every building in Gaza in a month. The key to that would be a more ‘biblical’ kind of warfare where you go in and kill every single male above the age of 12, which Israel and the US are clearly militarily capable of doing. That they aren’t doing it isn’t a question of capability. (Note, of course, that I am certainly not advocating this.)
Ukrainians in the occupied territories are, as pro-Russians often remind us, just unwilling to resist Russia to the degree that Gazans are Israel.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2hr ago
Took a quick look at a few of those it's pretty much what I expected. A lot less "the facts his basing his case on are objectively false" and a lot more "I don't like his framing". Though to be fair GGS isn't that good about making a facts-based case, and tries to make up for it with storytelling, so... fair enough I guess?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2hr ago
thousands of NATO mercs are running things on the ground.
The omnipresent slur (is this even a proper context for the word "slur"?) "mercs" in situations like this interests me. If they're mercenaries, does this mean that they'd instantly switch on the Russian side if they received a better offer?
Otherwise, it should go without saying that they haven't effectively beaten NATO in a conventional land war, since they haven't even beaten Ukraine (=forced it into an unadvantageous peace treaty or even an unadvantagenous frozen conflict situation), and they certainly aren't fighting the full force of NATO.
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.
functor
2hr ago
They have effectively beaten NATO in a conventional land war. They are fighting an enemy in which every operation is run by NATO, the equptment is NATO, thousands of NATO mercs are running things on the ground.
While Israel and the US can't take an area the size of a municipality in Gaza against enemies with no resources Russia took the area the size of Denmark in a week against an enemy with 3x larger force.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2hr ago
I think they could've made a better Snow White film than the original, it's just that they didn't want to. They wanted to make a bad film and did so.
I'm pretty sure no one involved in the process actually said "Our goal is to make a bad film". I'm pretty sure a lot of people involved in the process were trying as hard as they possibly could to make a blockbuster. Maybe all of them. And again, they had orders of magnitude more technology than Walt Disney had, but the technology didn't actually solve the problem of making a good movie even a little bit.
Mastery isn't the problem, it's bad people using great resources to achieve bad goals.
Just so. Humans inevitably human, for good or ill. They'll human with sticks and rocks, and they'll human just as hard with nanocircuitry and orbital launch vehicles and nuclear fusion.
Even if there's a full nuclear exchange induced by destabilizing technology, would the survivors really give up on securing more wealth, more power, more security through technological superiority?
Are you familiar with Bostrom's Vulnerable World Hypothesis? If not, I'd recommend it. The standard assumption is that tech advancements proceed in a stable fashion, that the increase in individual/breaking power is balanced by an increase in communal/binding power. I don't think that assumption is valid, not only for future tech, but very likely for tech that already exists. What we have available to us at this moment is probably enough to crash society as we know it; all that is required is for the dice to come up snake-eyes. Adding more tech just means we roll more dice. Maybe, as you say, some future development jacks the binding power up, and we get stable dystopia, but honestly I'd prefer collapse.
You're correct that we bounced back from the black death and so on. But consider something like Bostrom's "easy nukes" example. There, the threat is baked into tech itself. There's no practical way to defend against it. There's no practical way to live with it. You can suppress the knowledge, likely at grievous cost, but the longer you have it suppressed, the more likely someone rediscovers it independently. Bostrom's example is of course a parable about AI, because he's a Rationalist and AI parables are what Rationalists do. It seems to me, though, that their Kurzweilian origins deny them the perspective needed to see the other ways the shining future might be dismayed.
Blueberry
2hr ago
Bentham (the author) countered that Argument by saying he is not eating Almonds.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2hr ago
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.
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.
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