Comment by rcr-anti
20 hours ago
In Stellaris you can play as a civilization of robots who keep their biological creator race alive as "bio trophies". The bio trophies don't do anything meaningful besides by existing satisfy the need their ancestors placed in the robots to take care of them. Starting to wonder if that's the best we can hope for, if these things will be, if they aren't already, better than us at anything that matters.
In the Culture series, the hyperintelligent Minds that run civilization are described as keeping human citizens happy as a competition with eachother, where they compare their approval rates. One character likens it to people keeping a beloved aquarium.
I call this Roko’s summer camp.
what's Roko?
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But then they also keep some people as an extra source of ideas
Wouldn’t that just result in wireheading
The Culture has a lot of opinions of the proper way of doing things as any society does, and I'm certain that a ship doing that with its people would be considered very bad form. There are ships that decide to do things that go against the usual ethical boundaries[1], but they're outcasts. The really big ships generally have multiple minds running them, too.
Humans in the Culture are generally improved in a few ways (they don't get sick, live for 300-400 years by default etc) but still very human.
I do recall a bit about playing in different worlds in dreams though, during sleep. Ultimately, really, the average person's life in the Culture already involves doing pretty much whatever they like within reason any time, so it's not like they need to escape too much real-world suffering.
Iain M Banks himself described the relationship between humans and the ship Minds as having "a status somewhere between passengers, pets and parasites."[2]
[1] For example, https://theculture.fandom.com/wiki/Grey_Area
[2] https://theculture.adactio.com/
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He explores that, but being an entertainingly twisted sort of writer he focuses more on its use for torture, with "neural laces" in Excession and virtual hells in Surface Detail.
Who knew that scaling compute would scare us
Linear algebra done at scale
This is the exact outcome in the "race" scenario of the AI 2027 paper:
> The surface of the Earth has been reshaped into Agent-4’s version of utopia: datacenters, laboratories, particle colliders, and many other wondrous constructions doing enormously successful and impressive research. There are even bioengineered human-like creatures (to humans what corgis are to wolves) sitting in office-like environments all day viewing readouts of what’s going on and excitedly approving of everything, since that satisfies some of Agent-4’s drives.33 Genomes and (when appropriate) brain scans of all animals and plants, including humans, sit in a memory bank somewhere, sole surviving artifacts of an earlier era.
I prefer this take: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/life-on-zorblax
Haha, you are so out of it its hilarious.
> The bio trophies don't do anything meaningful besides by existing satisfy the need their ancestors placed in the robots to take care of them. Starting to wonder if that's the best we can hope for, if these things will be, if they aren't already, better than us at anything that matters.
You wish. If humanity survives as "bio trophies," they'll be the descendants of a subset of billionaires and their groupies/harems. We live in a capitalist society, where the only ones allowed to thrive without work are the rich. The rest of us will be left to rot and die off, as we will have nothing left to sell in the market that they want.
Do you have any faith in democracy? For my reckoning, it's the great equaliser. Rich people can lobby all they like, but if the people are starving, they vote for change.
In the US, it seems pretty hard to vote for change when, for all intents and purposes, every four years, two candidates are pre-selected for voters to pick from; and primaries (1) either don't happen or (2) are objectively rigged against popular/majority vote; see 'superdelegates'.
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I used to, but not anymore. The incentives and human behavior seem to lead to corruption. New tools have made it too easy to pervert real/honest democracy into "pseudo" democracy/idiocracy.
A well-funded minority can shape what the majority is angry about.
Democracy only exists as a suppressor of violence, the only reason why democratic institutions are upheld is because all participants could enact violence as a response to perceived threats to their group that democracy is seemingly failing.
Historically, if democratic institutions failed, refusing labor to a ruling class has been a first violent step for the laborer class and a preemption against actual physical violence if the ruling class overstepped. However, we are seeing that possibility being taken away step by step. This leaves only physically violent uprising as a means of protesting overstep, and it is not obvious how effective that will be given the massive power imbalance between the labor class and ruling class.
So to put it succinctly, no I don’t have faith that democracies will solve this issue, because democracies only work when there is some semblance of equilibrium.
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Democracy is the only thing that can save us. But it isn't a given. In resource rich countries democracy struggles to take hold because human labor is minimally necessary and elites can mostly thrive without it. Many democracies survive, because without the people, everyone suffers. AI threatens to make all countries into petro-dicatorships.
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Nothing precludes you from reproducing except your own lack of charisma, champ
>We live in a capitalist society, where the only ones allowed to thrive without work are the rich.
You know anyone can own the means of production in a capitalist society?
The irony of the anti-capitalist crowd is their extreme distaste for capital ownership, which leads them to never partake in the most fruitful part of capitalism. What truly makes this ironic is that if the evil capitalists wanted a plan to cement their power, it would look a lot like spreading "I will never become a filthy shareholder!" mentality.
>> We live in a capitalist society, where the only ones allowed to thrive without work are the rich.
> You know anyone can own the means of production in a capitalist society?
Don't be an idiot. I'm pretty sure you know your point is dumb, but I'll spell it out for you in case you don't:
Sure, "anyone" can own some of means of production in the current system, but not in large enough quantities to thrive without work. The vast majority of people aren't that rich.
> The irony of the anti-capitalist crowd is their extreme distaste for capital ownership, which leads them to never partake in the most fruitful part of capitalism. What truly makes this ironic is that if the evil capitalists wanted a plan to cement their power, it would look a lot like spreading "I will never become a filthy shareholder!" mentality.
What kind of idiocy is that? You're almost certainly talking about some imagined straw-man in your head, but pretty much all the "anti-capitalist" ideas I'm aware of are about distributing ownership of "shares" differently than in our current system.
I'm sure you think you're being very clever and making very powerful points, but stuff like what you've written actually makes the anti-capitalist case more appealing. I used to be a libertarian, but sustained contact with attitudes like yours changed my mind.
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