Post AsU0HF2ampCI41dehU by alakest@mstdn.social
(DIR) More posts by alakest@mstdn.social
(DIR) Post #AsToopnRx3JgAMo8cS by futurebird@sauropods.win
2025-03-27T12:32:13Z
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:: Sarah lives on a "primitivist server" run by a conservative group obsessed with the early 21st century, (just before the climate crisis) It simulates a barbaric time the server-founders regard as a 'golden age.' A world of forgotten horrors: poverty, cancer, psychologically damaging religions.By galactic law, it's illegal to simulate people unaware of other options... but, most people in Sarah's life have little interest in the "real" world beyond of the server. Sarah finds this maddening.
(DIR) Post #AsToxcrtO7hQfy4si0 by futurebird@sauropods.win
2025-03-27T12:33:48Z
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Sarah wants to see the other servers. She wants to experience the real Earth... and her darkest ambition... (very illegal) to be physically embodied there.She isn't totally alone. She hooks up with a group that builds "real" sculptures out of moon dust on the real moon using a robot that bypasses the conservative time-locked simulation's rules. These radicals are building a spaceship (about the size of a deck of cards) to fly to the surface of earth.
(DIR) Post #AsTpCo8llDKDyoD99s by futurebird@sauropods.win
2025-03-27T12:36:33Z
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It's a risky proposition, once you leave a history simulation server you can never return (due to information contamination.) They have no money, nothing of value to offer the embodied people of Earth. How can they survive? The process of breaking free leads them to uncover the dark secrets of the people who created their world. It turns out that the server-founders aren't really following the law. For most people in the 21st century the choice to "leave" is just an illusion.
(DIR) Post #AsTpEBc7yKJZ4TbIDg by jmax@mastodon.social
2025-03-27T12:36:32Z
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@futurebird Are they prepped for the changed environment since global mean temperature broke 50 C?
(DIR) Post #AsTpP5spcPLMU2cB6m by futurebird@sauropods.win
2025-03-27T12:38:46Z
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Since they don't have enough power or money to "embody" at full size, they end up using tiny robots on the scale of ants. And they will need the help of Earth's ants to expose the terrible secret of the 21st Century history simulation... a project regarded as quaint and educational by most people on Earth, when in reality it is a torture chamber.
(DIR) Post #AsTqEjET4zd3I6M9k8 by futurebird@sauropods.win
2025-03-27T12:48:04Z
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@jmax In this story the Earth isn't in too bad shape any more by this time. The "Climate Crisis" was mostly a crisis for humans: the food supply collapsed. A wave of extinctions, but small compared to The Big Five. And under the care of people who now value the ecosystems and biodiversity of Earth much more than we do now, adaptive radiation is in full swing. It's exactly this care for Earth's biodiversity that lead to the laws that make being embodied illegal for Sarah and her friends.
(DIR) Post #AsTr2Qz7CKcPAysPhY by wmd@chaos.social
2025-03-27T12:57:00Z
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@futurebird great stuff this.
(DIR) Post #AsTtXgURnbgi9OYqK8 by futurebird@sauropods.win
2025-03-27T13:25:09Z
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History simulation servers are a source of endless thorny moral problems. There is possible value in simulating the past, but everyone knows that a quality simulation will effectively mean forcing people to *live* in the past and much of human history is not anything anyone would choose to live with.The law settled on a compromise: 1. People in such simulations must have a way to leave.2. The people who start the simulation must live in it themselves, and they CAN NOT pick who they will be.
(DIR) Post #AsTtiQKCF3DJCSt3oG by platypus@glammr.us
2025-03-27T13:27:02Z
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@futurebird there it is 😂 💯 🐜
(DIR) Post #AsTtvzJZSfQ9U43w5w by futurebird@sauropods.win
2025-03-27T13:29:32Z
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The conservative factions have long complained that modern people are almost not people at all since regardless if they live embodied or in a simulation they rarely face the kind of pain and adversity that was common in the past. They look to our time and say that the least of us is more lucky than they are. But will they really roll the dice and live ANY 21st century life? Of course not. And that's not the only law they are breaking.
(DIR) Post #AsTu4upxTiuWCeT6qu by futurebird@sauropods.win
2025-03-27T13:31:09Z
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They discovered early on that almost no one wanted to stay in their simulated past. Even people who said they wanted to "live a life with real challenges" change their mind. Hence, to keep enough people in the simulation for it to work they have to rig the game. This is accomplished by a mental virus that makes it hard for people in the simulation to take seriously the possibility that life could possibly be any other way. Which means the server-runners are engaging in slavery.
(DIR) Post #AsTuG6lhSTroOPoVZA by michael_w_busch@mastodon.online
2025-03-27T13:33:09Z
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@futurebird John Rawls crossed with Greg Egan?
(DIR) Post #AsTuMtKdoTNCkPOLL6 by Flisty@mstdn.social
2025-03-27T13:34:20Z
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@futurebird it's like when (white people) wish themselves into living in the past. Guarantee they picture themselves having afternoon tea in a nice outfit, not living in poverty/as property/with cholera.
(DIR) Post #AsTuWQnSlEad8wQCoa by mcc@mastodon.social
2025-03-27T13:36:05Z
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@futurebird PLOT TWIST!! :D
(DIR) Post #AsU0HF2ampCI41dehU by alakest@mstdn.social
2025-03-27T14:40:34Z
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@futurebird Stanislas Lem - Non Serviam: Is an elaborate satire of the idea of artificial intelligence that gets to the heart of the moral dilemma that true success would create. It is written in the dry style of a book review that might appear in a broad scientific journal sometime in the near future. It discusses the book, Non Serviam, by Professor James Dobb, and through this the field of "personetics", the simulated creation of truly intelligent beings ("personoids") inside a computer.
(DIR) Post #AsULF2M94hDtBJZfxQ by JoshuaACNewman@xeno.glyphpress.com
2025-03-27T18:35:27Z
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@futurebird This deserves many thousands more words.
(DIR) Post #AsXfAnC7CFCUY08NRQ by Landa@graz.social
2025-03-29T09:02:56Z
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@futurebird that’s a very promising premise!