Reminds me of that techbro thought experiment where the solution to "uploading" a human neural pattern to a computer and determining which is the "original" is simply to make sure the original brain is destroyed in the process.
That techbro idea was explored in the show Upload. They take people nearing the end of their lives and literally burn off their heads to get their brain pattern.
Once you're in the digital world, your family needs to pay a monthly subscription to keep you in the nice place, otherwise you're put in the "free" zone where you're essentially frozen in stasis until they decide to delete you, but still get like a limited amount of bandwidth per week.
Sure, it may be presented as a drawback or some conditional requirement to "upload" in such fiction, but as soon as the scenario is open to the possibility of the human brain surviving the "upload" then it gets weird, even murderous, for some techbros. I've been in arguments where the dogmatically-held "a perfect copy is literally the exact same person" position was taken to the point of "the human brain is no longer needed and can be discarded" and I said "all right, let's say you wake up from the 'upload' and you happen to be the one still sitting in the chair or laying on the bed. Would you still feel that way and smile and wave at the 'upload' on the computer over there before being killed?"
I never got back a clear answer from that. Only insults. I made it a primary plot point in my novel trilogy that killing a living brain to answer the thought experiment's question isn't likely to go over well.
Yeah, that's the plot of the show. It turns out you don't really need to kill the person, but the company does it anyways because if they're dead IRL, they can't do productive labor and you can essentially turn their continued digital existence into a tax on their family.
They also kill the original person because there are major issues with the system and they have the ability to control your emotions and memories, so having someone else in the real world with contradictory ideas would ruin their scam.
Corporations tend to be cheap by design and by profit mandate, so I seriously believe the most likely "upload" outcome would be more like that Max Headroom TV show episode from the 80s, where the "uploads" were just looping animations of the deceased in cyber heaven declaring how happy they are, when no "upload" really happened and it was all a racket.
Calling it now - it's an animated spyware application that performs Google searches, orders shit on Amazon and sings "A Bicycle Built for Two" in your dead loved one's voice.
I never saw that show, but that sounds like how it would likely go, for sure.
I don't think I've yet heard anyone talk about the likelihood of techbro corporations editing emotions and memories, either. It's like the ultimate data mining.
Yeah, the show kinda surprised me. And with all the big companies shifting to metaverse, I think they'll probably just totally can it soon. It started in May of 2020 and still hasn't gotten a second season.
Like the whole thing is kinda uncanny with all the digital people asking their families to send them money for NFT Gucci handbags and stuff. I guess that was just starting when it was written, but it's definitely an almost perfect parody of the metaverse/NFT stuff.
That sounds arguably too infuriating and on point for me to handle as entertainment, myself.
I wrote some pretty damn dystopian fiction over the last few years but even that drained me quite a bit. I'm not going to pretend things aren't bad, but I need to survive and find my quiet corner in hellworld to recover, too.
I've heard a bunch of science fiction shorts with premises involving mind control. It's a central theme in Rainbows End. There was also a short story where an advertising techbro invents a mind control drug. The protagonist is a reporter trying to expose how evil and unethical he is, but the stinger is that he darts her right before she can expose him, then "marries" her. Super, super squick.
Big Yud is particularly into mind control, hypnotism, and drugging his "pets" to creep on them. He openly brags about it too, even writes horrible fanfiction where characters from childrens' fiction are mind controlled and violated.
Uploads are clones. You get a cool friend that can take everything you hold dear to the heat death of the universe and that's p.cool
The coolness of the clone depends on where it comes from.
Imagine clones of :melon-musk: tweeting cringe, forever.
I also think the main plot is that the protagonist of the story was murdered because he was attempting to build a version of the system where the digital space was treated as commons. They uploaded him to their version and erased his memories and forced him to write code for them. It was a pretty fucked up show and I wonder if Amazon will cancel it before they get to season 2.
I put my self published novel trilogy on a certain world spanning corporate distribution medium. Sometimes I think back to what I wrote about unspecified techbros (used fictional names and entities only) and the hellworld they built and are expanding right now and go :side-eye-1: :side-eye-2: wondering if my work's already been flagged somehow.
It kinda felt like a Verhoeven movie but updated to use modern corporate tropes. Instead of using the stylings of 1980s corporate advertisements, it used the stylings of 2015s corporate advertisements.
Eclipse Phase has non-destructive brain uploading, downloading, and forking. The old (capitalist) economy makes it a crime to create a 1:1 Alpha copy, with Alphas being killed if found so it won't confuse property laws. The new (anarchist reputation) economy generally doesn't discriminate against alpha forks, but they're culturally discouraged because due to a disaster there are a lot more human minds than available bodies and unnecessary forking is considered wasteful and indulgent.
The thing about NFTs, though, is you don't actually own the image. You don't buy a JPEG or whatever.
Shredding the original does nothing for the NFT because there still needs to be an image of it somewhere that you don't own by buying the NFT!
The NFT is the transaction that you paid to have put in the blockchain. There is only one transaction. I guess it's like the deed to a house. There should only be one, but that doesn't mean you are the one living there.
I knew that, but I don't think most NFT bros know that. Or care, because other NFT bros will buy anyway.
They took a very fitting artwork lol. It's called 'Morons' and in it, they auction off a canvas that has 'I can't believe you morons actually buy this shit' written on. Those techbros must have had at least a shred of situational awareness. However, burning artwork? :cringe:
I believe any potential awareness of being called morons could be dismissed by them saying they were ironically aware of that. Irony is a magic medicine, like mercury.
Instead of showing the two endings one after the other, that game should have ended with a 50/50 chance (completely random and not dependent on anything) of either going to the Ark or being stuck underwater
There would be endless arguments online about which is the true ending
never played it but watched a few long plays and was absolutely engrossed
A real gem. The monster sections aren't really its strong suit and end up feeling like a superfluous impediment by the end, but the story and themes absolutely carry it through.
-spoilers- hated that the uploaded doctor got the happy ending kinda, i wouldnt go into an eternity of paradise in a place this person designed, there was a part where you turn on and off a simulation to get info out of people like nothing, dont remember much but there was more
Setting shit on fire and losing value in the process while claiming you somehow gain it, is a perfect analogy for crypto
They've done this with artists who don't suck shit, too. They were gonna destroy a Basquiat piece but thank fuck the family stepped in to stop it.
I think a lot of people stopped giving a shit about him when Brad Pitt and Angelina Joile started buying his work. Kinda like when that little band you like gets famous and all the normies start going to their shows. It turns off a lot of true blue mfers
oh no the star trek teleporter struggle session again (youre right about it tho)
"There is no observable difference" is apparently all that's needed to ignore observed subjective reality. Apparently, you "teleported" as long as the place you were is destroyed, and you along with it, for convenience of the thought experiment. If you aren't destroyed, you didn't go anywhere, as you would then see at the moment the "teleport" happened.
Of course observers in the room could say "you totally teleported!" if they held that tightly to their perfect copy notions. There's probably a reason why so many of these thought experiments conveniently require the original brain destroyed as a convenience for their arguments.
Any "teleporting" that requires the destruction of something isn't really teleporting except in a handwavium way because of preconceived notions of what a "perfect copy" is. It's angels dancing on the head of a pin but could go a very dark way, with no one (left alive) the wiser, much like that "Upload" show showed. Same arguments could apply there all the way up to "hey wait a minute, you're murdering people" was exposed.
He made a new one, with no observable differences. No harm done! :troll:
Exactly why the only way I'd ever do a brain upload or replacement is if they did it Ship of Theseus style where it's replace in ridiculously tiny amounts over a ridiculously long period. Wouldn't be much different than your atoms being replaced over time naturally.
Idk I think it'd be cool to have two of me, plus the second you split the two people start diverging
Lore tried doing that with :geordi-no: and I think if he was given a chance he'd eventually be :geordi-yes:
how long until some eccentric art appreciator type goes full sicko and shoots up some crypto nerds
I unfortunately think some right clicker would be targeted first. :deeper-sadness:
This is like when Yves Klein burned a piece of paper and threw a bar of gold into the river so the only thing left is the transaction itself as a statement of existentialism
