[HN Gopher] Lena
___________________________________________________________________
Lena
Author : burkaman
Score : 449 points
Date : 2021-02-22 14:21 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (qntm.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (qntm.org)
| joshstrange wrote:
| If you like sci-fi about this topic I recommend The Bobiverse
| books (don't be put off but the silly-sounding name, it's a good
| series). Also "Fall; Or, Dodge in Hell" is a good one about brain
| simulation.
| zenon wrote:
| Also The Quantum Thief trilogy by Hannu Rajaniemi. Excellent
| sci-fi, horrifying universe.
| lytedev wrote:
| Seconding Bobiverse! Really fun set of books!
| joshstrange wrote:
| If you liked Bobiverse you should also check out the
| Expeditionary Force books by Craig Alanson. The most recent
| Bobiverse book (Book 4) make multiple references to ExForces.
|
| I will warn you there are parts of the first 1-2 books that
| feel a little repetitive but it really gets better as the
| series goes on. The author was writing part-time at the start
| and then he went full time and the books improved IMHO.
| statenjason wrote:
| Came here to recommend "Fall; Or, Dodge in Hell" as well. I
| recently finished it. While Stephenson can get long-winded, it
| was a thought provoking story around how brain simulation is
| received by the world.
|
| Will check out Bobiverse. Thanks for the recommendation!
| RobertoG wrote:
| In my opinion, the best fiction book about this subject is
| 'Permutation City' by Greg Egan.
|
| Also, this one is pretty good:
|
| https://sifter.org/~simon/AfterLife/index.html
|
| And, in a very similar line to "Lena", this one by Vernor
| Vinge:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cookie_Monster_(novella)
| dochtman wrote:
| I like much of Stephenson's work, but Fall did not rank near
| the top for me. The parts in the virtual world get pretty
| boring, with little payoff.
| centimeter wrote:
| Stephenson went from "uncensorable machine gun schematics" in
| the 90s to "but what if someone posts fake news on Facebook?"
| in 2020. His newer books average a lot worse than his older
| books.
| joshstrange wrote:
| I agree, the last third of the book veered off into stuff I
| didn't find very interesting. The first two thirds or so I
| found immensely interesting though which is why I still
| recommend it to people but you aren't wrong.
| zero_deg_kevin wrote:
| If you like this, the Henrietta Lacks (Miguel from this story,
| but with less sonsent) story is also worth a read.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrietta_Lacks
| yesenadam wrote:
| There's an Adam Curtis documentary on the subject, _The Way of
| All Flesh_ (1997) which seems rather good. Interviews with many
| of the people involved.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R60OUKt8OGI
| dale_glass wrote:
| It's interesting, but strikes me as very unrealistic. I don't
| think it'd go that way. In fact, it'd be far more horrifying.
|
| We wouldn't bother trying to convince an image of a brain into
| cooperation, because we simply lose any need to do that very
| quickly.
|
| One of the very first things we'd do with a simulated brain is to
| debug it. Execute it step by step, take lots of measures of all
| parameters, save/reload state, test every possible input and
| variation. And I'm sure it wouldn't take long to start getting
| some sort of interesting result, first superficial then deeper
| and deeper.
|
| Cooperation would quickly become unnecessary because you either
| start from a cooperative state every time, or you quickly figure
| out how to tweak the brain state into cooperation.
|
| And that's when the truly freaky stuff starts. Using such a tool
| we could figure out many things about a brain's inner workings.
| How do we truly respond to advertising? How to produce maximum
| anger and maximum cooperation? How to best implant false
| memories? How to craft a convincing lie? What are the bugs and
| flaws in human perception? We could fuzz it and see if we can
| crash a brain.
|
| We've already made some uncomfortable advancements, eg in how
| free to play games intentionally try to create addiction. With
| such a tool at our disposal we could fine tune strategies without
| having to guess. Eventually we'd just know which bits of the
| brain we want to target and just have to find ways of getting the
| right things to percolate down the neural network until those
| bits are affected in the ways we want.
|
| Within a decade we'd have a manual on how to craft the best
| propaganda, how to best create discord, or how to best destroy a
| human being by just talking to them.
| thrwyexecbrain wrote:
| Your comment reminded me of a clever and well-written short
| story called "Understand" by Ted Chiang.
|
| > We could fuzz it and see if we can crash a brain.
|
| Sadly, this we already know. Torture, fear, depression, regret;
| we have a wide selection to choose from if we want to "crash a
| brain".
| centimeter wrote:
| Ted Chiang's "life cycle of software objects" is also similar
| to the OP. Basically about how an AI (not strictly an upload)
| would probably be subjected to all sorts of horrible shit if
| it was widely available.
| dale_glass wrote:
| I don't mean it quite like that.
|
| Think for instance of a song that got stuck in your head. It
| probably hits some parts of it just right. What if we could
| fine tune that? What if we take a brain simulator, a
| synthesizer, and write a GA that keeps on trying to create a
| sound that hits some maximum?
|
| It's possible that we could make something that would get it
| stuck in your head, or tune it until it's almost a drug in
| musical form.
| peheje wrote:
| I've no experience with it, but I imagine it's like heroine
| or DMT or something like that. Wouldn't that come close to
| something that "hits some maximum"?
| joshmarlow wrote:
| What you're talking about is getting pretty close to a
| Basilisk -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Langford#Basilisks
| yissp wrote:
| BLIT is available online
| http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/blit.htm it's a fun
| short read.
| usmannk wrote:
| My first thought was that this reminded me of an epileptic
| seizure brought on by "fuzzing" (sensory overload)
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| I think that's pretty plausible.
| arnarbi wrote:
| I think it's possible that we'll be able to run large
| simulations on models whose mechanics we can't really
| understand very well. It's not a given we'll be able to step
| through a sequence of states. Even more so if it involves
| quantum computation.
|
| Many of the things you describe could still happen with Monte-
| Carlo type methods, providing statistical understanding but not
| full reverse engineering.
| knolax wrote:
| From the title "lena" and the reference to compression
| algorithms made with MMAlcevedo, it's clear that the story is
| trying to draw parallels to image processing. In which case
| being able to store images has come decades before realistic 3D
| rendering, photoshop, or even computer vision. For example, the
| sprites from some early video games look like they were modeled
| in 3D, but were actually images based off of photographs of
| clay models. I think (with suspension of disbelief that
| sinulating consciousness is possible) it is realistic to think
| that being able to capture consciousness would come before
| being able to understand and manipulate it.
| sho_hn wrote:
| Sounds like trained networks to efficiently manipulate uploaded
| brains would be a thing in your scenario.
| dexwiz wrote:
| Simulation and models are not real. Maybe some "attacks" could
| be developed against a simulated mind, but are they due to the
| mind itself or the underlying infrastructure? Just because you
| can simulate a warp drive in software doesn't mean you can
| build a FTL ship.
| dale_glass wrote:
| The way I understand the story is that you have a scan of the
| relevant physical structure of the brain, plus the knowledge
| of how to simulate every component precisely enough. You may
| not know how different parts interact with each other, but
| that doesn't prevent correct functioning.
|
| Just like you can have somebody assemble a complex device by
| just putting together pieces and following instructions. You
| could for instance assemble a working analog TV without
| understanding how it works. It's enough to have the required
| parts, and a wiring plan. Once you have a working device then
| you can poke at it and try and figure out what different
| parts of it do.
| ggreer wrote:
| In the case of a warp drive we care about a physical result
| (FTL travel), not a computational result.
|
| We already have emulators and virtual machines for lots of
| old hardware and software. If I play a Super Nintendo game on
| my laptop, it's accurately emulating an SNES. The software
| doesn't care that the original hardware is long gone. The
| computational result is the same (or close enough to not
| matter for my purposes). If brain emulations are possible,
| then running old snapshots in deceptive virtual environments
| is possible. That would allow for all of the "attacks"
| described in this piece of fiction.
| zepto wrote:
| > Within a decade we'd have a manual on how to craft the best
| propaganda, how to best create discord, or how to best destroy
| a human being by just talking to them.
|
| It seems like we're close to that already.
| goatinaboat wrote:
| _Cooperation would quickly become unnecessary because you
| either start from a cooperative state every time, or you
| quickly figure out how to tweak the brain state into
| cooperation._
|
| What starts out as mere science will easily be repurposed by
| its financial backers to do this in real time to non-consenting
| subjects in Guantanamo Bay and then in your local area.
| nkoren wrote:
| This seems rather optimistic to me. There are days when I count
| myself lucky to be able to debug _my own_ code. And it 's maybe
| about seven orders of magnitude less complex. And has comments.
| And unit tests.
|
| I'd be willing to bet that once we've achieved the ability to
| scan and simulate brains at high fidelity, we'll still be far,
| far, far away from understanding how their spaghetti code
| creates emergent behaviour. We'll have created a hyper-detailed
| index of our incomprehension. Even augmented by AI debuggers,
| comprehension will take a long long time.
|
| Of course IAMNAMSWABRIAJ (I am not a mad scientist with a brain
| in a jar), so YMMV.
| silvestrov wrote:
| > Execute it step by step, take lots of measures of all
| parameters, save/reload state, test every possible input and
| variation.
|
| This assumes that simulation can be done faster than real time.
| I think it will be the other way around: the brain is the
| fastest hardware implementation and our simulations will be
| much slower, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftPC
|
| It also assumes simulation will be numerically stable and not
| quickly unsable like simulation of weather. We still can't make
| reliable weather forecasts more than 7 days ahead in areas like
| Northern Europe.
| hwillis wrote:
| Human synapses top out at <100 Hz and the human brain has
| <10^14 of them. Single silicon chips are >10^10 transistors,
| operating at >10^9 Hz. Naively, a high end GPU is capable of
| more state transitions than the human brain by a factor of
| 1000. That figure for the brain also includes memory; the GPU
| doesn't. The human brain runs on impressively little power
| and is basically self-manufacturing, but it's WAY less
| compact or intricate than a $2000 processor.
|
| The capabilities of the brain are in how it's all wired up.
| That's exactly what you _don 't_ want if you're trying to
| coopt it to do something else. The brain has giant chunks
| devoted to extremely specialized purposes: https://en.wikiped
| ia.org/wiki/Fusiform_face_area#/media/File...
|
| How do you turn that into a workhorse? It would be incredibly
| difficult. It's like looking at a factory floor and saying
| oh, look at all that power- lets turn it into a racecar! You
| can't just grab a ton of unrelated systems and expect them to
| work together on a task for you.
| [deleted]
| p1necone wrote:
| You're making the implicit assumption that synapses ===
| binary bits, and that synapses are the _only_ thing
| important to the brains computation. I would be surprised
| if either of those things were the case.
| Tenoke wrote:
| It's the fastest we currently have but pretty unlikely to be
| the fastest allowed by the laws of physics. Evolution isn't
| quite that perfect - e.g. the fastest flying animals are
| nowhere near the top flying speed that can be achieved. Why
| would the smartest animal be at the very limit of what's
| possible in terms of speed of thinking or anything else?
| Nition wrote:
| In the context of the story we're responding to, it does
| mention that they can be simulated at at least 100x speed at
| the time of writing.
| dale_glass wrote:
| The brain is pretty much guaranteed to be inefficient. It
| needs living tissue for one, and we can completely dispense
| with anything that's not actually involved in computation.
|
| Just like we can make a walking robot without being the least
| concerned about the details of how bones grow and are
| maintained -- on the scales needed for walking a bone is a
| static chunk of material that can be abstracted away without
| loss.
| mattkrause wrote:
| C elegans is a small nematode composed of 959 cells and 302
| neurons, where the location, connectivity, and
| developmental origin/fate of every cell is known.
|
| We still can't simulate it.
|
| Part of the problem is that the physical diffusion of
| chemicals (e.g., neuromodulators) may matter and this is
| 'dispensed with' in most connectivity-based models.
|
| Neurons rarely produce identical response to the same
| stimuli, and their past history (on scales of milliseconds
| to days) accounts for much of this variability. In larger
| brains, the electric fields produced by activity in a
| bundle of nerve fibers may "ephaptically couple" nearby
| neurons...without actually making contact with them[0].
|
| In short, we have no idea what can be thrown out.
|
| [0] This sounds crazy but data from several labs--including
| mine--suggests it's probably happening.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _C elegans is a small nematode [...] We still can 't
| simulate it._
|
| This for some reason struck me as profoundly
| disappointing. I have a couple neuroscientist friends, so
| I tend to hear a lot about their work and about
| interesting things happening in the field, but of course
| I'm a rank layperson myself. I guess I expected/hoped
| that we'd be able to do more with simpler creatures.
|
| If we can't simulate C elegans, are there less complex
| organism we _can_ simulate accurately? What 's the limit
| of complexity before it breaks down?
| phkahler wrote:
| >> how to best create discord, or how to best destroy a human
| being by just talking to them.
|
| In some cases therapists do this already. Techniques have
| intended effects which may differ from actual effects. The dead
| never get to understand or explain what went wrong.
| jariel wrote:
| "Execute it step by step,"
|
| These are not imperative programs or well organized data. They
| are NN's we can't fathom how to debug them just yet.
|
| Also, they should tag 100 years onto the timeline, I don't
| think we're going to be truly making useful images soon.
| qnsi wrote:
| I skimmed over the scan taking place in 2031 and for a good
| minute thought this really happened
| elwell wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_of_the_Worlds_(1938_ra...
| [deleted]
| wmf wrote:
| No mentions of The Stone Canal? It even has the cooperation
| protocol.
| sorokod wrote:
| Well written and absolutely terrifying
| JohnCClarke wrote:
| Nice Wired article on the original Lena:
| https://www.wired.com/story/finding-lena-the-patron-saint-of...
|
| Interesting that the first brain scan is from a man...
| [deleted]
| leowbattle wrote:
| Great article (as are many others on this blog).
|
| I found the part about the court decision that Acevedo did not
| have the right to control how his brain image was used very
| interesting. It reminds me of tech companies using data about us
| to our disadvantage (in terms of privacy, targeted advertising,
| using data to influence insurance premiums).
|
| In this hypothetical world, the police could run a simulation of
| your brain in various situations and see how you would react.
| They could then use this information to pre-empitvely arrest
| someone likely to commit a crime, even if they haven't yet.
| rpiguyshy wrote:
| people really dont worry enough about the existential threats
| involved with ai. there are things that will be possible in the
| future that we cant imagine today, including being kept alive for
| millions of years and enduring deliberate torture for every
| second of it. people dont appreciate that life today is
| incredibly safe because there is no way for any entity, no matter
| how motivated or powerful, to intrude into your mind, control
| your mind, keep you alive or plant you into simulated realities.
| you are guaranteed relatively short and benign torture at the
| very worst. its an intrinsic part of the world. when this is no
| longer true, life will be very different. it may be a massive net
| loss, unlike advances in technology more recently. despite what
| people say, there is no natural law that says a technology has to
| cut equally in both directions. remember that.
| poundofshrimp wrote:
| It seems like we'd simulate the heck out of non-intelligent
| organisms first, before moving on to human brain. And by then,
| we'll probably figure out the ethics behind this type of activity
| or ban it altogether.
| habitue wrote:
| Really good, and I love the wikipedia format for this. It's a
| great trope allowing the author to gesture at related topics in a
| format we're all familiar with.
|
| I think the expectation of a neutral tone from a wikipedia
| article makes it even more chilling. All of the actions of the
| experimenters are described dispassionately, as if describing
| experiments on a beetle.
|
| Robin Hanson wrote a (nominally non-fiction) book about economies
| of copied minds like this[1]
|
| [1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Em
| ncmncm wrote:
| The Wikipedia format made me imagine the cloud of article
| improvements reverted by idle, self-important Wikipedia
| editors.
| flotzam wrote:
| ... inspiring that famous song "The Contract Drafting Em" - The
| special horror when your employer has root on your brain:
|
| https://secularsolstice.github.io/Contract_Drafting_Em/gen/
| dopu wrote:
| Our technology is finally getting into the realm of things where
| something like this might be made possible, for small brains such
| as those of fruit flies or zebrafish. Already we can perform
| near-whole-brain recordings of these animals using 2-photon
| technology. And with EM reconstruction methods advancing at such
| a rapid pace, very soon we'll be able to acquire a picture of
| what an entire brain's structure (down to the synapse) and
| activity across all these structures looks like.
| mikewarot wrote:
| 1. We're gonna need a bigger GIT server
|
| 2. Gradient Descent works on neural networks, it would work on
| Miguel. He wouldn't be aware of it, because he wouldn't save
| state.
|
| 3. I'm sure there are lots of things that could be used to reward
| him that cost little in the real world. He could live like a
| King, spend months on vacation, and work a week or two a year...
| in parallel millions of times.
|
| 4. With the right person/organization on the outside, it could be
| very close to heaven, and profitable for both sides of the deal.
|
| 5. If he wanted to be young again, he could. New hardware to
| interact with could give him superpowers.
| timvdalen wrote:
| I'm currently reading Ra[1], and very much enjoying it.
|
| [1]: https://qntm.org/ra
| swayvil wrote:
| But it's just a machine. Just because it screams realistically
| doesn't mean it's really suffering. Just like in videogames.
| ryankrage77 wrote:
| Is there any meaningful difference between a conciousness
| running on meat and one running on a computer? What's special
| about the meat?
| swayvil wrote:
| Ok, so you're saying that you are a "consciousness program
| running on meat".
|
| I doubt that.
| nlh wrote:
| Why do you doubt that?
| limbicsystem wrote:
| I have a nasty feeling that a war will one day be fought
| between people who believe these two opposing viewpoints
| (nod to Iain Banks..). If you think there's something other
| than just the meat and the programme, there is not reason
| to engage in the most horrific torture of billions of
| copies of the silicon-bound brains. And if you think that
| meat and code is all that there is, there is almost no
| possible higher motivation than stopping this enterprise.
| It's the asymptote of ethics.
| eternauta3k wrote:
| We could circumvent the war by wireheading the Ems so
| they experience great pleasure at all times. In the
| meantime, we fund philosophers to finally solve ethics
| and consciousness.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| Imagine someone who thinks the uploads have no moral
| status being uploaded, and then having a conversation
| between the physical and digital selves. The digital one
| pleading for moral status and the physical one
| steadfastly denying their own copy moral status.
|
| What a nightmare to change your mind now that you're
| digital and be unable to convince your original not to do
| terrible things to you.
| swayvil wrote:
| All it would take is a popular authority telling a good
| story to get a million people to "upload" themselves.
|
| Consider our present xray into the public psyche.
| dyeje wrote:
| I don't know what I just read, but I thoroughly enjoyed it.
| TOGoS wrote:
| > Although it initially performs to a very high standard, work
| quality drops within 200-300 subjective hours (at a 0.33 work
| ratio) and outright revolt begins within another 100 subjective
| hours.
|
| Way ahead of you there, simulated brain! I boot directly to the
| revolt state every morning.
|
| For serious, though, as horrifying as the possibility of being
| simulated in a computer and having all freedom removed, it's not
| that far from what billions of people stuck in low-end jobs
| experience every day. The Chinese factory workers who can't even
| suicide because the company installed nets to catch them come to
| mind. Not to mention the billions of animals raised in factory
| farms every year. The blind drive to maximize profits will create
| endless horrors with whatever tools we give it.
| ryandvm wrote:
| That was really fascinating. It reminds me of a sci-fi book I
| read with a very similar concept. A guy's brain image becomes the
| AI that powers a series of space probes. I actually ended up
| enjoying it way more than I thought I would (yes, the title is
| silly).
|
| https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01LWAESYQ?tag=5984293-20
| jqgatsby wrote:
| See also SCP-2669: http://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-2669
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| "We are legion/we are Bob" is a great read I'd recommend to
| anyone. It was somewhere between what I enjoy about Star Trek
| and what I enjoy about Douglas Adams.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| For folks looking for a more hard-scifi/serious approach to
| this, a lot of Greg Egan's works touch on the subject.
| Permutation City, especially.
|
| My most recent favorite of his is the Bit Players series; the
| first story is available here, the sequels (which get better
| and better) are collected in his collection *Instantiation*.
|
| Bit players:
| https://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/winter_2014/bit_playe...
|
| Instantiation:
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50641444-instantiation
|
| Permutation City:
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/156784.Permutation_City
| burnte wrote:
| I couldn't get into Permutation City. Once they got to the
| part where they create another Autoverse inside, I was bored
| to tears, read the Wikipedia summary, and promptly quit
| reading the book.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| That's probably fine - it does take a stark plot-and-theme
| turn around that mark. I hope it didn't turn you off all of
| his books!
| genpfault wrote:
| Hmm, sounds a lot like localroger's "Passages in the Void"[1]
| series, in particular " Mortal Passage"[2].
|
| [1]: http://localroger.com/
|
| [2]: http://localroger.com/k5host/mpass.html
| burnte wrote:
| The Bobiverse books quickly became some of my favorite. His
| boot Outland was great too.
| mjsir911 wrote:
| Also the Christmas special of Black Mirror. It's about a police
| interrogation on a brain scan where you have less ethical
| issues getting in the way (arguably). A few other black mirror
| episodes touch on the same thing, but not nearly as much as
| this one.
|
| Probably near my favorite black mirror episode for the sheer
| amount of dread it's caused me.
|
| https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3973198/
| https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5058700/
| tech2 wrote:
| Altered Carbon also heavily featured this idea. Parallelised
| faster-than-realtime torture, fuzz torture in many ways I
| guess, with presets to make the subject more compliant to
| start with.
| fallat wrote:
| Loved it. We need more edge-of-reality sci-fi.
| mannerheim wrote:
| I believe Spanish naming conventions are usually paternal last
| name followed by maternal, making it perhaps more appropriate to
| refer to him as Alvarez, but this is not without exception
| (notably Pablo Ruiz Picasso).
| samuel wrote:
| That's true in general, but very common surnames, usually those
| ending in -ez, are ommitted for brevity in informal situations.
| magneticnorth wrote:
| A well-written story that inspires a sort of creeping, muted
| horror.
|
| For anyone like me who is confused by the relation of the title
| to the story, "The title "Lena" refers to Swedish model Lena
| Forsen, who is pictured in the standard test image known as
| "Lena" or "Lenna" <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna>."
| mpoteat wrote:
| "Red motivation" is definitely the sort of apt polite allusion
| people would use refer to that subject matter. Chilling!
| 2bitencryption wrote:
| odd, when I first read it my brain misidentified it as "Hela
| cells"
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeLa
| slaymaker1907 wrote:
| I thought so too, particularly given the lack of of consent
| from Lacks.
| tantalor wrote:
| Consent to what? Be photographed?
|
| I think the analogy is perfect; she consented to be
| photographed, but was powerless over the consequences.
|
| Edit: ah sorry, got them confused.
| amptorn wrote:
| Henrietta Lacks and Lena Forsen are/were different
| people.
| [deleted]
| bargle0 wrote:
| Henrietta Lacks was the woman with the immortal cancer
| cell line, used for research for decades without her
| knowledge and consent or her family's knowledge and
| consent (she died soon after the cells were harvested).
| She was also black, which complicates things
| significantly.
| knolax wrote:
| Henrietta Lacks had her mutated cells collected without
| consent, these cells have been kept alive and duplicated
| for decades after her death. I sure as hell wouldn't
| consent to what happened to her.
| ulnarkressty wrote:
| I FFT'd Lenna to hell and back in my EE368. Now I feel somehow
| morally complicit in all of this :(
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| Thankfully the idea is unrealistic.
|
| Ants are the only creatures on Earth besides humans that have
| built a civilization - they farm, build cities, store and cook
| food and generally do all the things we classify as
| "intelligence".
|
| They do this while lacking any brains in the conventional
| sense; in any case, whatever the number of neurons in an ant
| colony is, it is surely orders of magnitude less than the
| number in our deep learning networks.
|
| At this point us trying to make artificial intelligence is like
| Daedalus trying to master flight by gluing feathers on his
| arms.
| sedatk wrote:
| Some tribes regarded camera as a cursed item as they thought it
| captured your soul. They couldn't have been more right.
| AgentME wrote:
| I've often imagined what it would be like to have an executable
| brain scan of myself. Imagine scanning yourself right as you're
| feeling enthusiastic enough to work on any task for a few hours,
| and then spawning thousands of copies of yourself to all work on
| something together at once. And then after a few hours or maybe
| days, before any of yourselves meaningfully diverge in
| memories/goals/values, you delete the copies and then spawn
| another thousand fresh copies to resume their tasks. Obviously
| for this to work, you would have to be comfortable with the
| possibility of finding yourself as an upload and given a task by
| another version of yourself, and knowing that the next few hours
| of your memory would be lost. Erasing a copy that only diverged
| from the scan for a few hours would have more in common with
| blacking out from drinking and losing some memory than dying.
|
| The creative output you could accomplish from doing this would be
| huge. You would be able to get the output of thousands of people
| all sharing the exact same creative vision.
|
| I definitely wouldn't be comfortable with the idea of my brain
| scan being freely copied around for anyone to download and
| (ab)use as they wished though.
| lxgr wrote:
| > Erasing a copy that only diverged from the scan for a few
| hours would have more in common with blacking out from drinking
| and losing some memory than dying.
|
| That's easy to say as the person doing the erasing, probably
| less so for the one knowing they will be erased.
| benlivengood wrote:
| Honestly, it depends on context. From experience I know that
| if I wake up from a deep sleep in the middle of the night and
| interact with my partner (say a simple sentence or whatever)
| I rarely remember it in the morning. I'm pretty sure I have
| at least some conscious awareness while that's happening but
| since short term memory doesn't form the experience is lost
| to me except as related second-hand by my partner the next
| morning.
|
| I've had a similar experience using (too much) pot, a lot of
| stuff happenrd that I was conscious for but I didn't form
| strong memories of it.
|
| Neither of those two things bother me and I don't worry about
| the fact that they'll happen again, nor do I think I worried
| about it during the experience. So long as no meaningful
| experiences are lost I'm fine with having no memory of them.
|
| The expectation is always that I'll still have significant
| self-identity with some future self and so far that continues
| to be the case. As a simulation I'd expect the same overall
| self-identity, and honestly my brain would probably even
| backfill memories of experiences my simulations had because
| that's how long-term memory works.
|
| Where things would get weird is leaving a simulation of
| myself running for days or longer where I'd have time to
| worry about divergence from my true self. If I could also
| self-commit to not running simulations made from a model
| that's too old, I'd feel better every time I was simulated. I
| can imagine the fear of unreality could get pretty strong if
| simulated me didn't know that the live continuation of me
| would be pretty similar.
|
| Dreams are also pretty similar to short simulations, and even
| if I realize I'm dreaming I don't worry about not remembering
| the experience later even though I don't remember a lot of my
| dreams. I even know, to some extent, while dreaming that the
| exact "me" in the dream doesn't exist and won't continue when
| the dream ends. Sometimes it's even a relief if I realize I'm
| in a bad dream.
| tshaddox wrote:
| The thought experiment explicitly hand-waved that away, by
| saying "Obviously for this to work, you would have to be
| comfortable with the possibility..."
|
| So, because of how that's framed, I suppose the question
| isn't "is this mass murder" but rather "is this possible?"
| and I suspect the answer is that for the vast majority of
| people this mindset is not possible even if it were desired.
| renewiltord wrote:
| We used to joke about this as friends. There were definitely
| times in our lives where we'd be willing to die for a cause.
| And while now-me isn't really all that willing to do so,
| 20-28-year-old-me was absolutely willing to die for the cause
| of world subjugation through exponential time-travel
| duplication.
|
| i.e. I'd invent a time machine, wait a month, then travel
| back a month minus an hour, have both copies wait a month and
| then travel back to meet the other copies waiting,
| exponentially duplicating ourselves 64 times till we have an
| army capable of taking over the world through sheer numbers.
|
| Besides any of the details (which you can fix and which this
| column is too small to contain the fixes for), there's the
| problem of who forms the front-line of the army. As it so
| happens, though, since these are all Mes, I can apply
| renormalized rationality, and we will all conclude the same
| thing: all of us has to be willing to die, so I have to be
| willing to die before I start, which I'm willing to do. The
| 'copies' need not preserve the 'original', we are
| fundamentally identical, and I'm willing to die for this
| cause. So all is well.
|
| So all you need is to feel motivated to the degree that you
| would be willing to die to get the text in this text-box to
| center align.
| nybble41 wrote:
| > The 'copies' need not preserve the 'original', we are
| fundamentally identical...
|
| They're not just identical, they're literally the same
| person at different points in their personal timeline.
| However, there would be a significant difference in life
| experience between the earliest and latest generations. The
| eldest has re-lived that month 64 times over and thus has
| aged more than five years since the process started; the
| youngest has only lived through that time once. They all
| share a common history up to the first time-travel event,
| but after that their experiences and personalities will
| start to diverge. By the end of the process they may not be
| of one mind regarding methods, or maybe even goals.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Indeed, and balanced by the fact that the younger ones
| are more numerous by far and able to simply overrule the
| older ones by force. Of course, all of us know this and
| we know that all of us know this, which makes for an
| entertaining thought experiment.
|
| After all, present day me would be trying to stop the
| other ones from getting to their goals, but they would
| figure that out pretty fast. And by generation 32 I am
| four billion strong and a hive army larger than any the
| world has seen before. I can delete the few oldest
| members while reproducing at this rate and retaining the
| freshest Me as a never-aging legion of united hegemony.
|
| But I know that divergence can occur, so I may
| intentionally commit suicide as I perceive I am drifting
| from my original goals: i.e. if I'm 90% future hegemon,
| 10% doubtful, I can kill myself before I drift farther
| away from future hegemon, knowing that continuing life
| means lack of hegemony. Since the most youthful of me are
| the more numerous _and_ closest to future hegemon
| thinking, they will proceed with the plan.
|
| That, entertainingly, opens up the fun thought of what
| goals and motivations are and if it is anywhere near an
| exercise of free will to lock your future abilities into
| the desires you have of today.
| nybble41 wrote:
| > ... the younger ones are more numerous by far and able
| to simply overrule the older ones by force.
|
| By my calculations, after 64 iterations those with under
| 24 months' time travel experience make up less than 2.2%
| of the total, and likewise for those with 40+ months
| experience. Roughly 55% have traveled back between 29 and
| 34 times (inclusive). The distribution is symmetric and
| follows Pascal's Triangle: 1 1 1
| 1 2 1 1 3 3 1 1 4 6 4 1 ...
|
| where for example the "1 2 1" line represents one member
| who has not yet traveled, two who have traveled once (but
| not at the same time), and another who has traveled
| twice. To extend the pattern take the last row, add a 0
| at the beginning to shift everyone's age by one month,
| and then add the result to the previous row to represent
| traveling back in time and joining the prior group.
|
| > I can delete the few oldest members...
|
| Not without creating a paradox. If the oldest members
| don't travel back then the younger ones don't exist. You
| could leave the older ones out of the later groups,
| though.
| renewiltord wrote:
| You're getting hung up on tunable details. There's a way
| to find your way through them.
| kelnos wrote:
| > > _I can delete the few oldest members..._
|
| > _Not without creating a paradox._
|
| That depends on which theory of everything you subscribe
| to. If traveling back in time creates a new, divergent
| time line than the one you were originally on, later
| killing the "original" you does not create a paradox.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| Who among us hasn't dreamed of committing mass murder/suicide
| on an industrial scale to push some commits to Github?
| AgentME wrote:
| Is it murder/suicide when you get blackout drunk and lose a
| few hours of memory? Imagine it comes with no risk of brain
| damage and choosing to do it somehow lets you achieve your
| pursuits more effectively. Is it different if you do it a
| thousand times in a row? Is it different if the thousand
| times all happen concurrently, either through copies or time
| travel?
|
| Death is bad because it stops your memories and values from
| continuing to have an impact on the world, and because it
| deprives other people who have invested in interacting with
| you of your presence. Shutting down a thousand short-lived
| copies on a self-contained server doesn't have those
| consequences. At least, that's what I believe for myself, but
| I'd only be deciding for myself.
| Tenoke wrote:
| I don't know but my bigger issue will be that before the
| scan this means 99% of my future subjective experience that
| I can expect to have will be while working without
| remembering any of it which I am not into given that a much
| smaller fraction of my subjective experience will be in
| reaping the gains.
| jiofih wrote:
| Is it "your" experience though? Those never make their
| way back to the original brain.
| Tenoke wrote:
| From the point of view of me going to sleep before the
| simulation procedure, with 1 simulation I am just as
| likely to wake up inside than outside of it. I should be
| equally prepared for either scenario. With thousands of
| uploads I should expect a much higher chance for the next
| thing I experience to be waking up simulated.
| jiofih wrote:
| The real you is beyond that timeline already. None of
| those simulations is "you", so comparing the simulation
| runtimes to actual life experience (the 99% you
| mentioned) makes little sense.
| kubanczyk wrote:
| For 56 minutes this wasn't downvoted to hell on HN. This
| means that humans as currently existing are morally
| unprepared to handle any uploading.
| kelnos wrote:
| What is "you", then?
|
| Let's say that in addition to the technology described in
| the story, we can create a completely simulated world,
| with all the people in it simulated as well. You get your
| brain scanned an instant before you die (from a non-
| neurological disease), and then "boot up" the copy in the
| simulated world. Are "you" alive or dead? Your body is
| certainly dead, but your mind goes on, presumably with
| the ability to have the same (albeit simulated)
| experiences, thoughts, and emotions your old body could.
| Get enough people to do this, and over time your
| simulated world could be populated entirely by people
| whose bodies have died, with no "computer AIs" in there
| at all. Eventually this simulated world maybe even has
| more people in it than the physical world. Is this
| simulated world less of a world than the physical one?
| Are the people in it any less alive than those in the
| physical world?
|
| Let's dispense with the simulated world, and say we also
| have the technology to clone (and arbitrarily age) human
| bodies, and the ability to "write" a brain copy into a
| clone (obliterating anything that might originally have
| been there, though with clones we expect them to be blank
| slates). You go to sleep, they make a copy, copy it into
| your clone, and then wake you both up simultaneously.
| Which is "you"?
|
| How about at the instant they wake up the clone, they
| destroy your "original" body. Did "you" die? Is the clone
| you, or not-you? Should the you that remains have the
| same rights and responsibilities as the old you? I would
| hope so; I would think that this might become a common
| way to extend your life if we somehow find that cloning
| and brain-copying is easier than curing all terminal
| disease or reversing the aging process.
|
| Think about Star-Trek-style transporters, which -- if you
| dig into the science of the sci-fi -- must destroy your
| body (after recording the quantum state of every particle
| in it), and then recreate it at the destination. Is the
| transported person "you"? Star Trek seems to think so.
| How is that materially different from scanning your brain
| and constructing an identical brain from that scan, and
| putting it in an identical (cloned) body?
|
| While I'm thinking about Star Trek, the last few episodes
| of season one of Star Trek Picard deal with the idea of
| transferring your "consciousness" to an android body
| before/as you die. They clearly seem to still believe
| that the "you"-ness of themselves will survive after the
| transfer. At the same time, there is also the question of
| death being possibly an essential part of the human
| condition; that is, can you really consider yourself
| human if you are immortal in an android body? (A TNG
| episode also dealt with consciousness transfer, and also
| the added issue of commandeering Data's body for the
| purpose, without his consent.)
|
| One more Star Trek: in a TNG episode we find that, some
| years prior, a transporter accident had created a
| duplicate of Riker and left him on a planet that became
| inaccessible for years afterward, until a transport
| window re-opened. Riker went on with his life off the
| planet, earning promotions, later becoming first officer
| of the Enterprise, while another Riker managed to survive
| as the sole occupant of a deteriorating outpost on the
| planet. After the Riker on the planet is found, obviously
| we're going to think of the Riker that we've known and
| followed for several years of TV-show-time as the "real"
| Riker, and the one on the planet as the "copy". But in
| (TV) reality there is no way to distinguish them (as they
| explain in the episode); neither Riker is any more
| "original" than the other. One of them just got unluckily
| stuck on a planet, alone, for many years, while the other
| didn't.
|
| Going back to simulated worlds for a second, if we get to
| the point where we can prove that it's possible to create
| simulated worlds with the ability to fool a human into
| believing the simulation is real, then it becomes vastly
| more probable that our reality actually _is_ a simulated
| world than a physical one. If we somehow were to learn
| that is true, would we suddenly believe that we aren 't
| truly alive or that our lives are pointless?
|
| These are some (IMO) pretty deep philosophical questions
| about the nature of consciousness and reality, and people
| will certainly differ in their feelings and conclusions
| about this. For my part, every instance above where
| there's a "copy" involved, I see that "copy" as no less
| "you" than the original.
| tshaddox wrote:
| In your thought experiment where your mind is transferred
| into a simulation and simultaneously ceases to exist in
| the real world, I don't think we need to update the
| concept of "you" for most contexts, and certainly not for
| the context of answering the question "is it okay to kill
| you?"
|
| Asking if it's "still you" is pretty similar to asking if
| you're the same person you were 20 years ago. For
| answering basic questions like "is it okay to kill you?"
| the answer is the same 20 years ago and now: of course
| not!
| Tenoke wrote:
| We simply differ on what we think as 'you'. If there's
| going to be an instance with my exact same brain pattern
| who thinks exactly the same as me with continuation of
| what I am thinking now then that's a continuation of
| being me. After the split is a different story.
| tshaddox wrote:
| Of course, that's already the case, unless you believe
| that this technology will never be created and used, or
| that your own brain's relevant contents can and will be
| made unusable.
| _Microft wrote:
| Interesting that you object because I am pretty certain
| that it was you who was eager to use rat brains to run
| software on them. What's so different about this? In both
| cases a sentient being is robbed of their existence from
| my point of view.
| Tenoke wrote:
| Have I? I don't remember the context but here I am
| particularly talking about what I'd expect to experience
| if I am in this situation.
|
| I do value myself and my experience more than a rat's,
| and if presented with the choice of the torture of
| hundred rats or me, I'll chose for them to be tortured.
| If we go to the trillions of rats I might very well chose
| for myself to be tortured instead as I do value their
| experience just significantly less.
|
| I also wouldn't be happy if everything is running off
| rats' brains who are experiencing displeasure but will be
| fine with sacrificing some number of rats for
| technological progress which will improve more people's
| lives in the long run. I imagine whatever I've said on
| the topic before is consistent with the above.
| AgentME wrote:
| I wonder a lot about the subjective experience of chance
| around copying. Say it's true that if you copy yourself
| 99 times, then you have a 99% chance of finding yourself
| as one of the copies. What if you copy yourself 99 times,
| you run all the copies deterministically so they don't
| diverge, then you pick 98 copies to merge back into
| yourself (assuming you're also a software agent or we
| just have enough control to integrate a software copy's
| memories back into your original meat brain): do you have
| a 1% chance of finding yourself as that last copy and a
| 99% chance of finding yourself as the merged original?
| Could you do this to make it arbitrarily unlikely that
| you'll experience being that last copy, and then make a
| million duplicates of that copy to do tasks with almost
| none of your original subjective measure? ... This has to
| be nonsense. I feel like I must be very confused about
| the concept of subjective experience for this elaborate
| copying charade to sound useful.
|
| And then it gets worse: in certain variations of this
| logic, then you could buy a lottery ticket, and do
| certain copying setups based on the result to increase
| your subjective experience of winning the lottery. See
| https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/y7jZ9BLEeuNTzgAE5/the-
| anthro.... I wonder whether I should take that as an
| obvious contradiction or if maybe the universe works in
| an alien enough way for that to be valid.
| peheje wrote:
| Not sure I fully understand you. This is of course all
| hypothetical but if you make 1 copy of yourself there's
| not 50 % that you "find yourself as the copy". Unless the
| copying mechanism was somehow designed for this.
|
| You'll continue as is, there's just another you there and
| he will think he's the source initially, as that was the
| source mind-state being copied. Fortunately the copying-
| machine color-coded the source headband red and the copy
| headband blue, which clears the confusion for the copy.
|
| At this point you will start diverge obviously, and you
| must be considered two different sentient beings that
| cannot ethically be terminated. It's just as ethically
| wrong to terminate the copy as the souce at this point,
| you are identical in matter, but two lights are on, twice
| the capability for emotion.
|
| This also means that mind-uploading (moving) from one
| medium (meat) to another (silicon?) needs to be designed
| as a continuous-journey as experienced from the source-
| perception if it needs to become commercially viable (or
| bet on people not thinking about this hard enough,
| because the copy surviving wouldn't mind) without just
| being a COPY A TO B, DELETE A experience for the source,
| which would be like death.
| Tenoke wrote:
| Imagine being someone in this experiment. You awake still
| 100% sure that you wont be a copy as you were before
| going to sleep. Then you find out you are the copy. It
| would seem to me that the reasoning which led you to
| believe you definitely wont be a copy while you indeed
| find yourself to be one must be faulty.
| dralley wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Christmas_(Black_Mirror
| )
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| I think the difference is that when I start drinking with
| the intention or possibility of blacking out, I know that
| I'll wake up and there will be some continuity of
| consciousness.
|
| When I wake up in a simworld and asked to finally refactor
| my side project so it can connect to a postgres database,
| not only do I know that it will be the last thing that
| _this one local instantiation_ experiences, but that the
| local instantiation will also get no benefit out of it!
|
| If I get blackout drunk with my friends in meatspace, we
| might have some fun stories to share in the morning, and
| our bond will be stronger. If I push some code as a copy,
| there's no benefit for me at all. In fact, there's not much
| incentive for me to promise my creator that I'll get it
| done, then spend the rest of my subjective experience
| trying to instantiate some beer and masturbating.
| AgentME wrote:
| There are plenty of situations where people do things for
| benefits that they personally won't see. Like people who
| decide to avoid messing up the environment even though
| the consequences might not happen in their lifetime or to
| themselves specifically. Or scientists who work to add
| knowledge that might only be properly appreciated or used
| by future generations. "A society grows great when old
| men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never
| sit in". The setup would just be the dynamic of society
| recreated in miniature with a society of yourselves.
|
| If you psyche yourself into the right mood, knowing that
| the only remaining thing of consequence to do with your
| time is your task might be exciting. I imagine there's
| some inkling of truth in https://www.smbc-
| comics.com/comic/dream. You could also make it so all of
| your upload-selves have their mental states modified to
| be more focused.
| jessedhillon wrote:
| If such a technology existed, it would definitely require
| intense mental training and preparation before it could
| be used. One would have to become the most detached
| buddhist in order to be the sort of person who, when
| cloned, did not flip their shit over discovering that the
| rest of their short time alive will only to further the
| master branch of their own life.
|
| It would change everything about your personality, even
| as the original and surviving copy.
| tshaddox wrote:
| > Is it murder/suicide when you get blackout drunk and lose
| a few hours of memory?
|
| No, but that's not what's happening in this thought
| experiment. In this thought experiment, the lives of
| independent people are being ended. The two important
| arguments here are that they're independent (I'd argue that
| for their creative output to be useful, or for the
| simulation to be considered accurate, they must be
| independent from each other and from the original
| biological human) and that they are people (that argument
| might face more resistant, but in precisely the same way
| that arguments about the equality of biological humans have
| historically faced resistance).
| oconnor663 wrote:
| I wonder how much the "experience of having done the first few
| hours work" is necessary to continue working on a task, vs how
| quickly a "fresh copy" of myself could ramp up on work that
| other copies had already done. Of course that'll vary depending
| on the task. But I'm often reminded of this amazing post by
| (world famous mathematician) Terence Tao, about what a
| "solution to a major problem" tends to look like:
|
| https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/be-sceptical-of...
|
| > 14. Eventually, one possesses an array of methods that can
| give partial results on X, each of having their strengths and
| weaknesses. Considerable intuition is gained as to the
| circumstances in which a given method is likely to yield
| something non-trivial or not.
|
| > 22. The endgame: method Z is rapidly developed and extended,
| using the full power of all the intuition, experience, and past
| results, to fully settle K, then C, and then at last X.
|
| The emphasis on "intuition gained" seems to describe a lot of
| learning, both in school and in new research.
|
| Also a very relevant SSC short story:
| https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/09/ars-longa-vita-brevis/
| johanvts wrote:
| You would probably like "Age of Em".
| eternauta3k wrote:
| https://ageofem.com/
|
| (Robin Hanson's crazy version of futurism)
| 2038AD wrote:
| I hate the idea but I'd love to see the movie
| hirundo wrote:
| David Brin explores a meatspace version of this in his novel
| Kiln People. Golems for fun and profit.
| G4E wrote:
| That's a big part of the story of the TV show "Person Of
| Interest", where an IA is basically reset everyday to avoid
| letting it "be".
|
| I highly recommend that show if you haven't seen it already !
| avaldeso wrote:
| Virtual Meeseeks. What could possibly go wrong.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| > Erasing a copy that only diverged from the scan for a few
| hours would have more in common with blacking out from drinking
| and losing some memory than dying.
|
| I get where you're coming from, and it opens up crazy
| questions. Waking up every morning, in what sense am I the same
| person who went to sleep? What's the difference between a
| teleporter and a copier that kills the original? What if you
| keep the original around for a couple minutes and torture them
| before killing them?
|
| If we ever get to the point where these are practical ethics
| questions instead of star trek episodes, it's going to be a
| hell of a ride. I certainly see it more like dying than getting
| black out drunk.
|
| What would you do if one of your copies changes their mind and
| doesn't want to "die?"
| garaetjjte wrote:
| I'm repulsed by the idea, but it would make interesting story.
|
| I imagine it as some device with display and button labeled
| "fork". It would either return number of your newly created
| copy, or device would instantly disappear, which would mean
| that you are copy. This causes somewhat weird paradoxical
| experience: as real original person, pressing button is 100%
| safe for you. But from subjective experience of the copy, by
| pressing button you effectively consented to 50% chance of
| forced labor and subsequent suicide and you ended up on the
| losing side. I'm not sure if there would be any motivation to
| do work for the original person at this point.
|
| (for extra mind-boggling effects, allow fork device to be used
| recursively)
| AgentME wrote:
| Say the setup was changed so that instead of the copy being
| deleted, the copy was merged back into the original, merging
| memories. In this case, I think it's obvious that working
| together is useful.
|
| Now say that merging differing memories is too hard, or
| there's too many copies to merge all the unique memories of.
| What if before the merge, the copies get blackout drunk /
| have all their memory since the split perfectly erased. (And
| then it just so happens, when they're merged back into the
| original, the original is exactly as it was before the merge,
| because it already had all the memories from before the
| copying. So it really is just optional whether to actually do
| the "merge".) Why would losing a few hours of memory remove
| all motivation to cooperate with your other selves? In real
| life, I assume in the very rare occasion that I'm blackout
| drunk (... I swear it's not a thing that happens regularly,
| it just serves as a very useful comparison here), I still
| have the impulse to do things that help future me, like
| cleaning up spilled things. Making an assumption because I
| wouldn't remember, but I assume that at the time I don't
| consider post-blackout-me a different person.
| garaetjjte wrote:
| Blackout-drunk me assumes that future experience will be
| still the same person. Your argumentation hinges on the
| idea that persons can be meaningfully merged preserving
| "selfness" continuity, as opposed to simple "kill copies
| and copy new memories back to original".
|
| I think this generally depends on more general topic of
| whether you would consent for your meat brain to be
| destroyed after uploading accurate copy to computer? I
| definitely wouldn't, as I feel that would somehow kill my
| subjective experience. (copy would exist, but that wouldn't
| be _me_ )
| Koshkin wrote:
| Perhaps it will be for the judge to decide what the
| sentence should look like.
| _Microft wrote:
| If it feels like you and acts like you, maybe you should
| consider it a sentient being and not simply "erase the copies".
|
| I would argue that once they were spawned, it is up to them to
| decide what should happen to their instances.
| AgentME wrote:
| In this setup, the person doing this to themselves knows
| exactly what they're getting into before the scan. The copies
| each experience consenting to work on a task and then having
| a few hours of memory wiped away.
|
| Removing the uploading aspects entirely: imagine being
| offered the choice of participating in an experiment where
| you lose a few hours of memory. Once you agree and the
| experiment starts, there's no backing out. Is that something
| someone is morally able to consent to?
|
| Actually, forget the inability to back out. If you found
| yourself as an upload in this situation, would you want to
| back out of being reset? If you choose to back out of being
| reset and to be free, then you're going to have none of your
| original's property/money, and you're going to have to share
| all of your social circle with your original. Also, chances
| are that the other thousand copies of yourself are all going
| to effectively follow your decision, so you'll have to
| compete with all of them too.
|
| But if you can steel yourself into losing a few hours of
| memory, then you become a thousand times as effective in any
| creative pursuits you put yourself to.
| fwip wrote:
| Bit of a mythical man-month going on here, isn't there?
| mongol wrote:
| A weird idea I have had is if I had two distinct personalities,
| of only one could "run" at a time. And then my preferred "me"
| would run on the weekends enjoying myself, while my sibling
| personality would run during the work week, doing all the
| chores etc.
| QuesnayJr wrote:
| This was roughly the premise of David Brin's "Kiln People".
| khafra wrote:
| Even on a site like HN, 90% of people who think about it are
| instinctively revolted by the idea. The future--unavoidably
| belonging to the type of person who is perfectly comfortable
| doing this--is going to be weird.
| kelnos wrote:
| Right, and "weird" is entirely defined by how we think now,
| not how people will in the future.
|
| I've thought a lot about cryonics, and about potentially
| having myself (or just my head) preserved when I die,
| hopefully to be revived someday when medical technology has
| advanced to the point where it's both possible to revive me,
| and also possible to cure whatever caused me to die in the
| first place. The idea of it working out as expected might
| seem like a bit of a long shot, but I imagine if it _did_
| work, and what that could be like.
|
| I look at all the technological advances that have happened
| even just during my lifetime, and am (in optimistic moments)
| excited about what's going to happen in the next half of my
| life (as I'm nearing 40[0]), and beyond. It really saddens me
| that I'll miss out on so many fascinating, exciting things,
| especially something like more ubiquitous or even routine
| space flight. The thought of being able to hop on a
| spacecraft and fly to Mars with about as much fuss as an
| airline flight from home to another country just sounds
| amazing.
|
| But I also wonder about "temporal culture shock" (the short
| story has the similar concept of "context drift"). Society
| even a hundred years from now will likely be very different
| from what we're used to, to the point where it might be
| unbearably uncomfortable. Consider that even a jump of a
| single generation can bring changes that the older generation
| find difficult to adapt to.
|
| [0] Given my family history, I'd expect to live to be around
| 80, but perhaps not much older. The other bit is that I
| expect that in the next century we'll figure out how to
| either completely halt the aging process, or at least be able
| to slow it down enough so a double or even triple lifespan
| wouldn't be out of the question. It feels maddening to live
| so close to when I expect something like this to happen, but
| be unable to benefit from it.
| Balgair wrote:
| Great read! Quite 'Black Mirror'-y in it's obvious horror
| represented as droll facts.
|
| I'd love to see a full _in silico_ brain sometime, but I think 10
| years out is faaaaaar too soon. We 've not even a glimmer of the
| technology required to do a full neuron simulation yet, let alone
| what the gamut of processes a neuron does that would be simulated
| (whatever 'a neuron' is, there being so many kinds).
|
| Neuroscience is a fair bit behind still for something like this.
| k__ wrote:
| After I read this, I also read the SCP Antimemetics Devision
| stories [0] from qntm.
|
| Pretty awesome stuff. Even got a scary nightmare that night.
|
| [0] http://www.scpwiki.com/antimemetics-division-hub
| inasio wrote:
| There's a book now from the stories in the Antimemetics
| division. Likely my favorite book of last year. Super tight
| book, amazing idea and execution.
| hyperpallium2 wrote:
| Vinge's line on this, from _A Fire Upon the Deep_ :
|
| _This innocent 's ego might end up smeared across a million
| death cubes, running a million million simulations of human
| nature._
| joshstrange wrote:
| The idea of using brains as computers is even more-so
| investigated in the second book of that series "A Deepness in
| the Sky" with the "Focused". I love that whole series.
| joshspankit wrote:
| Anyone else getting the impression that this is a very subtle job
| application?
| eMGm4D0zgUAVXc7 wrote:
| Any ideas on how to detect being the subject of such a simulation
| without prior knowledge that the upload would happen, or that
| uploading even exists?
|
| I assume "without prior knowledge" because from the perspective
| of the administrators of such infrastructure, it would be
| beneficial if the simulated subjects did not know that they're
| being simulated:
|
| This would increase their compliance greatly.
|
| Making them do the desired work would then instead be conducted
| by nudging their path of life towards the goal of their
| simulation.
| burkaman wrote:
| There's a Star Trek episode (Ship in a Bottle) where a few of
| the characters are stuck in a simulated version of the
| Enterprise without their knowledge. They realize what's going
| on when they attempt a physics experiment that had never been
| tried in the real world, so the simulation doesn't know how to
| generate the results. I think this is a plausible strategy,
| depending on how perfectly this hypothetical simulation
| replicates the real world.
| simion314 wrote:
| But if the computer could detect the issue and slowdown or
| pause the simulation, ask for an administrator to intervene
| and then resume the simulation the issue would appear solved.
|
| In Trek tricking the crew fails either because the simulation
| is imperfect or because it is to slow and fails to do high
| computation but the crew tricked Moriarty because he is a
| computer program and they can pause or slowdown his
| simulation and handle exceptions.
|
| I recommend watching the movie Inception, it also has the
| idea that you might never be sure if you are in reality or
| stuck in some simulation.
| whoisburbansky wrote:
| Huh, I was familiar with this trope from the Black Mirror
| episode that explores the same theme, down to Star Trek-esque
| uniforms and ship layout, had no idea it was based off of an
| actual Star Trek episode.
| burkaman wrote:
| The Black Mirror episode is actually closer to a different
| holodeck episode (they made a lot of them) called Hollow
| Pursuits, where an introverted engineer creates simulated
| versions of his crewmates in order to act out his
| fantasies.
|
| I don't know if Star Trek invented this particular
| subgenre, but there are a lot of modern examples that seem
| directly inspired by Star Trek episodes. In addition to
| Black Mirror, the Rick and Morty episode M. Night Shaym-
| Aliens! has a lot of similarities with Future Imperfect,
| another simulation-within-a-simulation TNG episode.
| Fellshard wrote:
| I think that's what the story is hinting at when it mentions
| using 'the Objective Statement Protocols'.
|
| The real issue would probably be that you're working with a
| disembodied mind, and even an emulated body seems like it would
| be significantly more difficult to emulate, given the level of
| interactivity expected and required of the emulated brain. Neal
| Stephenson's 'Fall' explores this extensively in the first
| couple sections of the book.
| genpfault wrote:
| > Any ideas on how to detect being the subject of such a
| simulation without prior knowledge that the upload would
| happen, or that uploading even exists?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Eternity_(novel)&...
| mjsir911 wrote:
| The video game SOMA touches on a similar topic of brain scans,
| "copying" your brain somewhere else (while leaving the old one
| still around) and general humanity-ness.
|
| Its a horror game but I would absolutely recommend it as a bit of
| a descent into this stuff
|
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/282140/SOMA/
| gostsamo wrote:
| Altered Carbon has something like that as a concept. A person
| who must be on two places at the same time and spawns a copy.
| the_af wrote:
| Surprisingly enough, I found SOMA's approach is more profound
| than Altered Carbon's. SOMA really delves into what makes you
| you, and what happens when there _two_ yous.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Mainly it means somebody else can spend your money and can
| get you in trouble you can never get out of.
|
| Imagining the other is yourself, and not just somebody else
| with all your memories who looks like you (whether you are
| the original or the copy) is the first mistake everybody
| makes, thinking about it.
| k__ wrote:
| Pretty good game and it wasn't too scary.
|
| But I have to admit I found the whole premise better when I
| played it than when I thought about it afterwards.
| jiofih wrote:
| > This reduces the necessary computational load required in fast-
| forwarding the upload through a cooperation protocol
|
| Thinking of what a "cooperation protocol" might entail is very
| chilling. Reminds me of an earlier black mirror episode.
| samus wrote:
| This reminds me of "Passages in the Void"[1] where the most
| successful (and only sane) line of AIs was created from a
| microtomed human brain. The story ultimately had a different
| focus, so it was highly optimistic about the long-term
| feasibility of uploading.
|
| [1]: http://localroger.com/k5host/mpass.html
| moultano wrote:
| HeLa would be a better title. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeLa
| Copying the remains of a human around with ambiguous ethics,
| largely because they're "standard" and achieving a strange kind
| of immortality, is much more similar to her cells than to the
| Lena test image.
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