MMAcevedo aka Lena by qntm

Just sharing that I bought Valuable Humans in Transit some years ago and I concur that it's very nice. It's a tiny booklet full of short stories like Lena that are way out there. Maximum cool per gram of paper.

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One of my favourite reads for sure - I've been looking for similar reads since.

I enjoyed "the raw shark texts" after hearing it recommended - curious if you / anyone else has any other suggestions!

And Blindsight. I will recommend Blindsight all day, even if it's not directly to do with uploading.

I keep trying to read Diaspora and struggle too much with the concepts presented early on. Very "hard sci-fi", just stick it out and it all gets explained?

I loved There is no Antimemetics division. I haven't read the new updated to the end but the prose and writing is greatly improved. The idea of anomalous anti-memes is scary. I mean, we do have examples of them, somewhat, see Heaven's Gate and the Jonestown massacre, though they're more like "memes" than "antimemes" (we know what the ideas were and they weren't secrets).

> Been

you didn't consume the entire thing in a 2 hour binge uninterrupted by external needs no matter how pressing like everyone else did??

> It is not about digitised human brains: it's about spinning up workers

It's about both and neither.

The author is dead. I think we can consider it as much a cautionary tale about digitised human brains as we can about the other things.

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I was quite disappointed with the essay when I originally read it, specifically this paragraph:

> This is extremely realistic. This is already real. In particular, this is the gig economy. For example, if you consider how Uber works: in practical terms, the Uber drivers work for an algorithm, and the algorithm works for the executives who run Uber.

There seems to be a tacit agreement in polite society that when people say things like the above, you don't point out that, in fact, Uber drivers choose to drive for Uber, can choose to do something else instead, and, if Uber were shut down tomorrow, would in fact be forced to choose some other form of employment which they _evidently do not prefer over their current arrangement_!

Do I think that exploitation of workers is a completely nonsensical idea? No. But there is a burden of proof you have to meet when claiming that people are exploited. You can't just take it as given that everyone who is in a situation that you personally would not choose for yourself is being somehow wronged.

To put it more bluntly: Driving for Uber is not in fact the same thing as being uploaded into a computer and tortured for the equivalent of thousands of years!

Soma was really good, and certainly worth playing if someone likes sci-fi and single-player FPSes and this subject matter, but there are some fundamentally frustrating things about it. Number one for me: in contrast with something like Half Life, you play a protagonist who speaks and has conversations about the world, and is also a dumbass. The in-game protagonist pretty much ends the game still seemingly not understanding what the hell is going on, when the player figured it out hours or days before. It's a bit frustrating.

Thank you for the re-orientation...

> this is an exaggeration for fictional purposes

To me what's horrifying is that this is not exaggeration. The language and thinking are perfectly in line with business considerations today. It's perfectly fair today e.g., for Amazon to increase efficiency within the bounds of the law, because it's for the government to decide the bounds of coercion or abuse. Policy makers and business people operate at a scale that defies sympathy, and both have learned to prefer power over sentiment: you can force choices on voters and consumers, and get more enduring results for your stakeholders, even when you increase unhappiness. That's the mirror on reality that fiction permits.

I assumed it was a wink to the Nov 1972 Playboy model[1] whose centerfold face became a de facto baseline test image for DSP algorithms without consent.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna

Even if you're not using red motivation, you've no idea if the LLM provider is using that under the hood... :p

It was a little jarring when Sam Altman recommended this on X awhile back.

https://xcancel.com/sama/status/1952070519018373197?lang=en

It's not a guidebook, it's a thought experiment on "what if you could do that", and that's the entire point.

We can't expect to succeed, but our cycle from the ancient Greeks thinking there were four elements where the right mix of air, earth, fire and water would create any substance and thus it was possible to turn lead into gold, took us on a path that developed into alchemy, then chemistry, then physics, giving us at first far more elements, then we realised the name "atom" (Greek "ἄτομον", "uncuttable") was wrong and those were made of electrons, protons, and neutrons and the right application of each would indeed let us turn lead into gold…

And the cargo cults, clear cutting strips to replicate runways, hand-making their own cloth to replicate WW2 uniforms, carving wood to resemble WW2 radios? Well, planes did end up coming to visit them, even if those recreating these mis-understood roles were utterly wrong about the causation.

We don't know the necessary and sufficient conditions to be a mind with subjective inner experience. We don't really even know if all humans have it, we certainly don't know which other species (if any) have it, we wouldn't know what to look for in machines. If our creations have it, it is by accident, not by design.

I mean we already do 'it'-- by it I don't mean uploading people, but rather create businesses that operate people via an API then hook those APIs to profit maximization algorithms with little to no regard for their welfare. Consider Amazon's warehouse automation, door dash, or uber.

Of course it's much more extreme when their entire existence and reality is controlled this way but in that sense the situation in MMAcevedo is more ethical: At least it's easy to see how dangerous and wrong it is. But when we create related forms of control the lack of absolute dominion frequently prevents us from seeing the moral hazard at all. The kind of evil that exists in this story really doesn't require any of the fancy upload stuff. It's a story about depriving a person of their autonomy and agency and enslaving them to performance metrics.

All good science fiction is holding up a mirror at our own civilization as much as it is doing anything else. Unable to recognize ourselves we sometimes shudder at our own monstrosity, if only for a moment.

This is a sad take, and a misunderstanding of what art is. Tech and tools go "obsolete". Literature poses questions to humans, and the value of art remains to be experienced by future readers, whatever branch of the tech tree we happen to occupy. I don't begrudge Clarke or Vonnegut or Asimov their dated sci-fi premises, because prediction isn't the point.

The role of speculative fiction isn't to accurately predict what future tech will be, or become obsolete.

I think that's a little harsh. A lot of the most powerful bits are applicable to any intelligence that we could digitally (ergo casually) instantiate or extinguish.

While it may seem that the origin of those intelligences is more likely to be some kind of reinforcement-learning algorithm trained on diverse datasets instead of a simulation of a human brain, the way we might treat them isn't any less though provoking.

That is the same categorical argument as what the story is about: scanned brains are not perceived as people so can be “tasked” without affording moral consideration. You are saying because we have LLMs, categorically not people, we would never enter the moral quandaries of using uploaded humans in that way since we can just use LLMs instead.

But… why are LLMs not worthy of any moral consideration? That question is a bit of a rabbit hole with a lot of motivated reasoning on either side of the argument, but the outcome is definitely not settled.

For me this story became even more relevant since the LLM revolution, because we could be making the exact mistake humanity made in the story.

Lena isn't about uploading. https://qntm.org/uploading

what

that’s one way to look at it I guess

have you pondered that we’re riding the very fast statistical machine wave at the moment, however, perhaps at some point this machine will finally help solve the BCI and unlock that pandora box, from there to fully imaging the brain will be a blink, from there to running copies on very fast hardware will be another blink, MMMMMMMMMMacevedo is a very cheeky take on the dystopia we will find on our way to our uploaded mind future

hopefully not like soma :-)

“Irrelevant” feels a bit reductive while the practical question of what actually causes qualia remains unresolved.

I actually think it was quite prescient and still raises important topics to consider - irrespective of whether weights are uploaded from an actual human, if you dig just a little bit under the surface details, you still get a story about ethical concerns of a purely digital sentience. Not that modern LLMs have that, but what if future architectures enable them to grow an emerging sense of self? It's a fascinating text.

That seems like a crazy position to take. LLMs have changed nothing about the point of "Lena". The point of SF has never ever been about predicting the future. You're trying to criticize the most superficial, point-missing reading of the work.

Anyway, I'd give 50:50 chances that your comment itself will feel amusingly anachronistic in five years, after the popping of the current bubble and recognizing that LLMs are a dead-end that does not and will never lead to AGI.

I have not seen as prediction as actual technology, but mostly as a horror story.

And a warning, I guess, in unlikely case of brain uploading being a thing.

You need to be way less "literal", for lack of a better word. With such a narrow reading of what literature is, you are missing out.

https://qntm.org/uploading

E.g.

> More specifically, "Lena" presents a lush, capitalist ideal where you are a business, and all of the humanity of your workforce is abstracted away behind an API. Your people, your "employees" or "contractors" or "partners" or whatever you want to call them, cease to be perceptible to you as human. Your workers have no power whatsoever, and you no longer have to think about giving them pensions, healthcare, parental leave, vacation, weekends, evenings, lunch breaks, bathroom breaks... all of which, up until now, you perceived as cost centres, and therefore as pain points. You don't even have to pay them anymore. It's perfect!

Ring a bell?

Not sure how LLMs preclude uploading. You could potentially be able to make an LLM image of a person.

Found the guy who didn't play SOMA ;)

I’m not an expert in the subject, but I wonder why you have such a strong view? IMHO if it was even possible to copy the human brain it would answer a lot of questions regarding our integrity, autonomy and uniqueness.

Those answers might be uncomfortable, but it feels like that’s not a reason to not pursue it.

I wouldn't be surprised if in (n hundreds/thousands years) we find out that copying consciousness if fundamentally impossible (just like it's fundamentally impossible to copy an elementary particle).

Good ideas in principle. Too bad we have absolutely no way of enforcing them against the people running the simulation that hosts our own consciousnesses.

Crazy that people are downvoting this. Copying a consciousness is about the most extreme violation of bodily autonomy possible. Certainly it should be banned. It's worse than e.g. building nuclear weapons, because there's no possible non-evil use for it. It's far worse than cloning humans because cloning only works on non-conscious embryos.

> Attempting to copy the human brain or human consciousness is one of the biggest mistakes that can be made in the scientific field.

This will be cool, and nobody will be able to stop it anyway.

We're all part of a resim right now for all we know. Our operators might be orbiting Gaia-BH3, harvesting the energy while living a billion lives per orbit.

Perhaps they embody you. Perhaps you're an NPC. Perhaps this history sim will jump the shark and turn into a zombie hellpacalypse simulator at any moment.

You'll have no authority to stop the future from reversing the light cone, replicating you with fidelity down to neurotransmitter flux, and doing whatever they want with you.

We have no ability to stop this. Bytes don't have rights. Especially if it's just sampling the past.

We're just bugs, as the literature meme says.

Speaking of bugs, at least we're not having eggs laid inside our carapaces. Unless the future decides that's our fate for today's resim. I'm just hoping to continue enjoying this chai I'm sipping. If this is real, anyway.