[HN Gopher] Lena (2021)
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Lena (2021)
Author : hugs
Score : 87 points
Date : 2023-12-05 20:55 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (qntm.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (qntm.org)
| jkingsman wrote:
| This, along with "It Looks Like You're Trying To Take Over The
| World"[0] are two of my favorite short pieces of speculative
| fiction that embody the Frederik Pohl quote, "a good science
| fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but
| the traffic jam."
|
| This story, a sequel, and other great short stories are collected
| in his book of ten short stories "Valuable Humans in Transit".[1]
| I'm a big fan of supporting indie scifi offered with DRM-free
| ebooks! [I am not affiliated with qntm despite my enthusiasm]
|
| [0]: It Looks Like You're Trying To Take Over The World:
| https://gwern.net/fiction/clippy
|
| [1]: Valuable Humans in Transit: https://qntm.org/vhitaos
| marcellus23 wrote:
| I didn't realize this was the same person who wrote Fine
| Structure! That book is amazing. Definitely going to pick up
| their other books now.
| jkingsman wrote:
| Ooh I haven't read that one. Next on the list!
| mhink wrote:
| So, I wasn't that big a fan of the Clippy story (probably not
| the target reader here) but the QNTM one was *fantastic*.
| aloe_falsa wrote:
| Funnily enough, "MMAcevedo" doesn't break my suspension of
| disbelief, while "Clippy" does, hard - even though it tries to
| stay grounded in reality and drown you in quotes and
| references.
| nmeofthestate wrote:
| What happened at the end of It Looks Like etc, after it's
| killed all humans, and it launches the ICBMs? Does it decide to
| kill itself for some reason? Couldn't decipher that.
| jsnell wrote:
| Previous discussions:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26224835
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32696089
| hugs wrote:
| I think it's HN where I first learned of it. I decided to
| repost it now because recent complaints on social media that
| ChatGPT is getting lazy reminded me of this line in Lena:
|
| "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."
| dang wrote:
| Thanks! Macroexpanded:
|
| _MMAcevedo_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32696089 -
| Sept 2022 (16 comments)
|
| _Lena_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26224835 - Feb
| 2021 (218 comments)
| renewiltord wrote:
| This guy is a pretty good writer. I really liked _There is no
| Anti-Memetics Division_ as well. I like some of this kind of
| stuff where you have sci-fi that "mechanizes" a technology so
| it's mundane and rote.
| bjelkeman-again wrote:
| Ra, is one of my favourite stories.
| okasaki wrote:
| If you liked this you might also like Age of Em by Robin Hanson:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Em
|
| "Train an em to do some job and copy it a million times: an army
| of workers is at your disposal. When they can be made cheaply,
| within perhaps a century, ems will displace humans in most jobs.
| In this new economic era, the world economy may double in size
| every few weeks."
|
| Unfortunately it seems both Hanson and qntm have been proven
| incorrect. Our overlords will be bootstrapped from reddit and
| wikipedia rather than scanned brains.
| gattr wrote:
| But as soon as you can run an open-source model privately on
| your workstation, laptop, eventually a phone - common man's
| position might get somewhat improved.
| stcredzero wrote:
| Would it improve in relative terms to those entities who can
| run 1000's and millions of such agents? And what if that
| disparity gets exponentially steeper as time goes on?
| stcredzero wrote:
| _When they can be made cheaply, within perhaps a century, ems
| will displace humans in most jobs._
|
| When they can be used for most military purposes, something
| deeply fundamental about human political organization will have
| been completely disrupted.
| merelysounds wrote:
| I guess we should add (2021) to the title.
|
| The story is especially relevant today because of recent LLM /
| GPT advancements; however, it is almost three years old. Perhaps
| that makes it all the more impressive.
| FartyMcFarter wrote:
| Fortunately LLMs are not based on biological brains.
| thih9 wrote:
| I'd say they are. In most cases the training set largely
| consists of output from biological brains. It likely includes
| some images with brain scans too.
| hugs wrote:
| Yeah, the author also wrote about some of the motivations
| behind Lena. I was surprised LLMs / GPTs weren't a direct
| inspiration (at least not explicitly mentioned).
| https://qntm.org/uploading
| swagmoney1606 wrote:
| I think about this story a lot. Is it bad it's nearly a price I'd
| pay?
|
| Is it dumb that I wish more than anything, that I could live
| forever? All I wish, is that I could learn all there is to learn,
| see all there is to see, and create many beautiful things. It is
| so sad to me that I will die before we solve the immortality
| problem.
| sockaddr wrote:
| It's not dumb. It's a feeling that I share. However even if the
| technological hurdles are overcome I'm not sure I'd remain
| viable after learning that my loved ones (and especially
| children) are long gone if they couldn't be preserved.
|
| When I was a teen and before making a family Immortality seemed
| like a dream. Now it seems like it could actually be a
| nightmare if not implemented properly.
|
| EDIT: To add further. Just being with my child, holding their
| hand, listening to their little stories about toys etc now
| feels much more important than any future time as an immortal
| instance freely exploring the wonders of the universe. If you
| want to chase immortality don't have kids. It will seriously
| change how to perceive things.
| p1esk wrote:
| I don't see much difference between brain uploading and having
| children.
| sockaddr wrote:
| Bob [1], is that you?
|
| [1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32109569-we-are-
| legion-w...
| remram wrote:
| In this story, you don't live forever. You live a few hours, in
| a limited simulation, to interact with an individual that is
| alien to you. Then you die.
|
| The fact that an infinite number of you will get to experience
| this doesn't make you "live forever".
| pokstad wrote:
| Reminds me of "The Redemption of Time" regarding Tianming's mind
| being part of a "cloud computing" solution.
| kibwen wrote:
| I find this short story to be most effective when rendered as a
| Wikipedia article:
| https://dump.cy.md/4042875593f06aa0cbe7722295831c10/Screensh...
| hugs wrote:
| Brilliant. Though I was a little sad all the numbered footnotes
| don't actually exist. The universe of this story would be a fun
| rabbit hole to go down.
| holtkam2 wrote:
| I read this for the first time years ago and I still think about
| it a few times per month at least.
| stcredzero wrote:
| What I find brilliant about this work, is that it calls back to
| many things the scientific community has done in the past. (Like
| the use of specially bred lab rats and immortal human cell
| culture lines.) I would expect to see many of the events in the
| story play out in real life, if human minds ever are uploaded.
| mortenjorck wrote:
| Perhaps the most fascinating thing about reading this (a mere!)
| two years later is how much its speculative future, vivid and
| unsettling portrayal notwithstanding, is almost certainly no
| longer a possibility for ours. Imagine, simulating an entire
| human brain to perform tasks it turns out need only a vague,
| brute-forced approximation of our language centers!
|
| It's like Jules Verne imagining, in exquisitely plausible detail,
| a flying machine whose many complex mechanisms and articulations
| at last allow man to fly like the birds - only a few years before
| the Wright brothers prove all you need is a fixed wing, a few
| cleverly-placed flaps, and enough thrust.
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