Welcome to Life: the singularity, ruined by lawyers (2012) [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFe9wiDfb0E

by nabla9 • 3 years ago

175 87 3 years ago

If you liked this, you might like the novel Permutation City by Greg Egan.

alexpotato• 3 years ago

Fall; or, Dodge in Hell by Neal Stephenson has aspects of "who pays for the digital afterlife and who gets to control it?" as well.

adhesive_wombat• 3 years ago

And Surface Detail for a pretty gruesome depiction of what happens if you do a public-private partnership for hell.

grammarxcore2• 3 years ago

I really struggled to get into this; I’ve had several people recommend it. How far do you think it’s important to read before deciding it’s not for me?

qup• 3 years ago

It's not important for you to read it at all. Skip it.

amanaplanacanal• 3 years ago

I usually like Stephenson quite a bit, but I couldn’t get through this one either.

reubenmorais2• 3 years ago

I just quickly paged through it to try to answer this. I'd say peak engagement for me when I couldn't wait to find out what happened next was around 60% of the way in, but I was fully engaged from the beginning, I read it over 2 days.

I'd support qup's comment, there's too many good books in the world to drudge your way through a book that doesn't click :)

__MatrixMan__• 3 years ago

It wasn't Egan's best, from a storytelling perspective, but the ideas were juicy enough to keep me engaged.

newswasboring3• 3 years ago

You also might like the later Bobiverse books.

b112• 3 years ago

Really like the authors style. He has a new book too.

EwanG• 3 years ago

Made 11 years ago, still holds up (unfortunately).

ChatGTP• 3 years ago

Let’s face it, this is everything Silicon Valley has ever wanted.

Just needs more targeted advertising and AI and it’s current.

SkeuomorphicBee• 3 years ago

I'd like to also recommend his other work of speculative fiction:

The Artificial Intelligence That Deleted A Century https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JlxuQ7tPgQ

It is a great intersection of copyright maximalism and the dangers of making general purpose AIs without proper care in developing their goal function.

richardwhiuk• 3 years ago

Single Point of Failure: The (Fictional) Day Google Forgot To Check Passwords - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4GB_NDU43Q is another, different topic, but still worth watching.

Daffodils• 3 years ago

This is superb, very Black Mirror-esque.

tgv• 3 years ago

It's too far fetched and too flimsily executed, IMO. It's more of a parody of the paperclip factory than a serious warning against unleashed AIs.

matmann2001• 3 years ago

Reminded me of the Amazon show called Upload. Sort of a lighter, more humorous take than Black Mirror, but the darker philosophical complexities still surface regularly.

2-718-281-8282• 3 years ago

Don't forget to check out this gem: https://youtu.be/O2RIvJ1U7RE?t=153

"EctoLife: The World’s First Artificial Womb Facility"

disqard• 3 years ago

Maybe it's just me, but this video looked like dystopian satire... did anyone else view it that way?

It reminded me of Keiichi Masuda's "Hyper Reality":

https://youtu.be/YJg02ivYzSs

elmomle• 3 years ago

An oddly prescient (though much less nuanced) version of a similar concept is in Rollerball (1975): https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/720ad4a5-5a51-4b97-b521-2a1d1fa...

idopmstuff• 3 years ago

If you like weird, sci-fi stuff, I can't recommend 17776 highly enough: https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football

rootsudo• 3 years ago

"3,553,858 views 11 years ago."

Still feels quite valid and the future we're heading towards.

mitchdoogle• 3 years ago

It's an interesting idea but is it scary? Any such "consciousness" existing in a digital realm is a copy and so the real organic you would never experience these things

phone86753093• 3 years ago

Why does this matter given that you would still perceive things as if it were were still in your real and organic state?

PUSH_AX2• 3 years ago

you

A fascinating and complex concept there.

vasco• 3 years ago

Would have an interesting impact on the capitalist system which bases some of the incentives on leaving an inheritance to your offspring which gets taxed. If your assets would be used in the afterlife the dynamic changes. All your earnings would still be able to be taxed but how many people would leave any inheritance for descendents if you'll need it for your next consciousness? Would people value their alter-ego having a good forever life or their offspring having a good real-life? The societal changes in behavior would be interesting.

tough• 3 years ago

Lookiing at how egypt pharao's did it they very much went with the good forever life

FartyMcFarter2• 3 years ago

Suppose you do it ship-of-theseus style, one neuron at a time (or heck, one atom at a time if you want). In that case I'd find it hard to argue for your position.

troyvit3• 3 years ago

I haven't watched the video yet so take this with a grain of salt.

dd for a human amirite? Maybe one atom at a time, but you'd have to make sure you get all the bacteria that helps control your personality as well right?[1] Then you need to simulate the changes in that system, based on how you interact with the rest of a virtual world, including relationships with other people[2], so you'd have to have an accurate copy of that too. What do you do if your virtual self needs to interact with a still living, breathing human? How do you simulate the changes to your micro-biome that occur there? How do you simulate what your copied human "eats" and how it processes that food?[3] Having a copy of all your atoms is a start but you also need to simulate all of those processes accurately if you want it to be truly "you."

Then what you end up with is -- assuming we know everything that makes up a human being and how it behaves -- a perfect copy of you along with a perfect copy of your world.

[1] https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2014/08/116526/do-gut-bacteria-rul...

[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-37298-9

[3] http://www.wormbook.org/chapters/www_intermetabolism/interme...

DanHulton• 3 years ago

Well, if you have empathy for others, it's still scary.

Dudeman1122• 3 years ago

You can always say "no" when it asks if you want to continue life, unlike in Lena as some other commenter mentioned

Better than current reality, where "no" is shoved on your throat and most people insist you better be grateful about it

boerseth• 3 years ago

In order for me to still feel like "me" afterward, there would have to be a linking stage during which I could get used to this digital extension of my mind, like an artificial limb for me to get used to as part of my body. Then, as the biological mind withered and died, like pouring a liquid from one container to another, the digital brain would come to represent a larger and larger part of "me", finally containing all of my consciousness.

You could compare the process to how the cells of your body (in particular your brain) eventually all get replaced, yet the stream of consciousness flows uninterrupted through a number of these replacements.

harha_2• 3 years ago

This. I can think of a 3D+time process where your "continuum" isn't interrupted.

mschuster91• 3 years ago

The ethical conundrum is: at one point and afterwards, there will be "two" of you - basically, a digital fork of your physical consciousness.

Now, the physical consciousness may wish to live a separate life instead of fully "passing over" or ceasing to exist eventually (i.e. to die). But who will be considered "you" from that point? The physical "you" or the virtual "you"? Can the virtual "you" force the physical "you" to die?

brycedriesenga• 3 years ago

Eh, I have a much less narrow definition of "you" than you do.

newswasboring3• 3 years ago

Even if it's not "me" (whatever that means), I do fear for whatever/whoever that consciousness is. It's the same fear I have towards the next generation, I don't want to leave a horrible world for them.

PS: My god I have always known writing about this stuff is hard because language is inadequate for recursive thoughts, but I never thought I would see a day when it will practically affect my daily discourse. These were discussions I usually had under the influence of specific substances.

fwlr• 3 years ago

There’s a lot of philosophical discussion about what would happen with uploading consciousness, grappling with the question of “do you get a ‘transfer’ where your consciousness wakes up in the digital realm” and so forth.

I’ve always thought the obvious result is that both the physical and the digital consciousness would wake up. Physical you would have some convincing personal experience of “I did not experience a transfer”, meanwhile digital you would have some equally convincing personal experience of “I did experience a transfer”.

teddyh2• 3 years ago

The “you” of today won’t experience the problems that the “you” of tomorrow will, so why not throw caution to the wind?

the real organic you

It’s part of the concept that there is no “real” you; they are both equally real.

teddyh2• 3 years ago

Relevant: https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2005-07-21

mock-possum2• 3 years ago

why should that make it any less scary for such "consciousness?"

spdustin• 3 years ago

This reminds me of “The Upload”, a comedy series on Amazon Prime, where your digital consciousness is uploaded to a commercial cloud when you die, to live on in a digital utopia. A utopia with IAPs, low-data cap slums, etc.

Edit: in fact, “The Upload” almost seems like it came directly from this short.

em-bee2• 3 years ago

yup, this is just like "Upload". great series too.

xtracto• 3 years ago

That reminded me of the San Junipero episode in Black Mirror. I guess the series you mentioned was inspired by that episode.

rakejake• 3 years ago

Greg Egan describes all this and more in "Permutation City"

midhhhthrow2• 3 years ago

The copyrights by gosh 18k per month. Either fiat has continued its crash or their overcharging for copyrights.

It’s a disaster that these things exist quite as long as they do

bragr• 3 years ago

I think you are underestimating how much synchronization licenses cost.

phone86753093• 3 years ago

Never underestimate how much companies gouge a captive audience.

IndigoIncognito• 3 years ago

This is a cult classic

hobo_mark• 3 years ago

Obligatory link to the popular "Lena" short form novel on the same topic: https://qntm.org/mmacevedo

FartyMcFarter2• 3 years ago

That's definitely worth a read, although I'm not sure it's the same topic. ROT13'd, contains spoilers:

Gung fgbel vf zber bs n serr sbe nyy, jurer crbcyr qb nalguvat naq rirelguvat gb na hcybnqrq uhzna.

1970-01-01• 3 years ago

     How do the machines know what Tasty Wheat tasted like? Maybe they got it wrong. Maybe what I think Tasty Wheat tasted like actually tasted like oatmeal, or tuna fish. That makes you wonder about a lot of things. You take chicken, for example: maybe they couldn't figure out what to make chicken taste like, which is why chicken tastes like everything.

pallas_athena• 3 years ago

-- The Matrix (1999)

nico• 3 years ago

Nice username, the beginning of time

MichaelMoser123• 3 years ago

the Androids in "Do Androids dream of electric sheep" by Philip K Dick also make things up, just like an LLM.

The book calls this "false memories", where we call it "hallucinations"...

classified• 3 years ago

At over 10 years of age, it's still totally accurate. Permadeath is the only way to escape advertisers and copyright hoarders.

joshuaheard• 3 years ago

Why blame lawyers? Lawyers apply the laws. If you don't like the laws, change them.

oatmeal1• 3 years ago

Reminds me of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEEBE7_-aMM&list=PLD3WAy9LRI...

fxj• 3 years ago

was that the idea of upload?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upload_(TV_series)

mock-possum2• 3 years ago

not really sure what lawyers have to do with this

slaymaker1907• 3 years ago

After seeing the current wave of AI, the "restricted mental activities" makes me think such a program would prohibit sexual fantasies and other NSFW thoughts.

midhhhthrow2• 3 years ago

To be clear, it wasn’t ruined by lawyers. It was ruined by copyright laws

adave• 3 years ago

I'd recommend watching Upload after this, based on this exact concept just not as good as the video, still pretty realistic.

Welcome to Life: the singularity, ruined by lawyers (2012) [video]

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