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
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.
I think you are referring to LLM bots, the so-called "AI" tools that are everywhere now? Because ISTM that these are manifestly _not_ intelligent, and their main function has been to illustrate, both literally and metaphorically, that most humans lack the critical facilities needed to discern superficially-plausible nonsense from actual intelligent output from intelligent beings.
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.
The fact that an infinite number of you will get to experience this doesn't make you "live forever".
but the image can live much longer (story says 59 years), and you can talk to it.. so the benefits are great. Moving to computer to escape illness or debiliating accident is an obvious use case, but there tons of smaller benefits. Make a 12-person startup where each employee is yourself. Unsure whether to learn Lisp or haskell? Learn both in two instances. Feel last 20 years of your life wre a mistake? Restore old backup..
The possibilities are endless, but the price is high. Would you want this? I am not sure myself but I can imagine someone else saying yes.
From your point of view, you step into a machine, and then you randomly experience one of the interactions with a user. If the image truly lives forever, you have overwhelming chance of interacting with somebody completely alien to you, who will ask you things you don't fully understand, and marvel at your primitiveness. Then you die.
You have some small chance of living for a few years with a user you understand. Probably still much shorter, less rewarding, less free than if (by chance) you are the version of yourself that steps out of the scanner and lives their natural, physical life instead.
It's a Prestige situation [1] except you have been tricked into it, because the image does not get used according to the terms you signed.
"There'll be people just like me forever" is very different from "I live forever", to me.
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.
If you had this preference before, would you say having kids altered your preferences?
> If you want to chase immortality don't have kids. It will seriously change how to perceive things.
Then I wonder if, in a sense, kids are like drugs: they alter your utility function to put something else first in line, so preserving yourself comes at best as a 2nd choice after prioritizing the first choice.
I don't think it'd be rational to "chose" to get addicted to a dangerous drug, and for the same reason just like you I think that you shouldn't have kids if you want to chase immortality.
Oh yes. Very much like the brain slugs in Futurama
> and for the same reason just like you I think that you shouldn't have kids if you want to chase immortality.
Yes. However having children does "turn on" certain emotions and modes of thinking that you don't get otherwise (at least I didn't prior), so I'd think that not having kids also deprives one of a very key aspect of the human experience.
I didn't get your reference (not from my generation) but I could find a description on https://futurama.fandom.com/wiki/Brain_Slug and yes, that's a perfect example of what I meant!!!
> However having children does "turn on" certain emotions and modes of thinking that you don't get otherwise (at least I didn't prior), so I'd think that not having kids also deprives one of a very key aspect of the human experience
Then the same could be said by, say opioids or cocaine addicts to rationalize their behavior "it turns on certain emotions and modes of thinking you didn't have prior" - but that's the definition of altering the utility function!
> not having kids also deprives one of a very key aspect of the human experience.
In a statistical sense, I think that's true, but if you believe that it's ok to alter your utility function, then it should also be ok to decide to get addicted to a dangerous drug people use to be more like them?
Say like teens vaping because their fried do it, adults drinking alcohol at parties... except children are defined as something positive, for prosocial reasons (like in your example, if the brain slug political party was in power)
Acevedo has done a great service to humanity, to help get all this valuable work done. Even if he himself has experienced much suffering.
[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32109569-we-are-legion-w...
"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.
When they can be used for most military purposes, something deeply fundamental about human political organization will have been completely disrupted.
To the best of my understanding, "Lena" is written as a warning that we should not WANT brain emulation.
My best guess is that it's a reference to the scanned Playboy image that was used as a standard in early image processing work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna. But if this is true, I'm surprised it isn't mentioned in the article where the article discusses the meaning of the story: https://qntm.org/uploading.
Is there a better answer?
"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."
MMAcevedo - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32696089 - Sept 2022 (16 comments)
Lena - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26224835 - Feb 2021 (218 comments)
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.
We managed to have a "mind" ready to answer all your questions, do some tasks, and it have a context at which it is instantiated for a task and then discarded. Reality is stranger than fiction, but it have too many parallels with this story.
Now, what if GPT5+ ends being an AGI? In which moment we should start worrying about the morals of having a sentient AI working for us in a pretty similar way than in this story?
