Here's a thought experiment. I offer you the chance to be put in a medically induced coma and shipped around the world to strangers you know nothing about. You don't know what economic, political, or moral system you'll awaken to. The only thing you know for sure is they, for some reason we're interested in receiving an unconscious person, no questions asked.
Do you take the deal? Do you sign your family up for it?
Brains 'R Us recently filed for chapter 11 and has been cut up and sold for scrap to private equity. The new PE firm has your brain. In 2208 there's a large grey market for brains to be used for hybrid AI and meat bag workflows. It's technically illegal in many jurisdictions due to "ethical implications", but is still the cheapest way to run many workloads. The method used to harness the brain involves reanimating it in a jar of jelly, and then forcing it to do the 2208 equivalent of a captcha. Each time the brain fails a captcha, the brain receives an electric impulse which simulates the most excruciating pain that the brain can respresent, but the brain cannot scream or run away.
> grey market for brains to be used for hybrid AI and meat bag workflows ... is still the cheapest way to run many workloads.
It's an absolute nightmare scenario, but luckily it has become completely implausible since 2023. We're actually on a trajectory for human brains becoming the most expensive option for basically any job. Not saying this would make me comfortable with brain cloning, but at least the simple economic incentive seems to be gone.
>> We're actually on a trajectory for human brains becoming the most expensive option for basically any job.
Unless RTX9000 with 16PB of ram needed to run basic Gemini2077 model costs more than a house, but a brain jar with electrodes is cheaper than that. Then the economic incentives will shift the other way.
No I don't think so. We can already create LLMs that are highly efficient and infinitely more knowledgeable than any single human being, completely tuned to the task, without ego or distractions, and they are cheap enough that you can run tens of them in parallel for a few hundred dollars per month. They are also way faster than any human being. And we're three/ four years in this. Imagine 50 years from now.
That's the whole point though - I can't, and I don't think anyone can. Right now the LLMs are just getting bigger and bigger, we're bruteforcing the way out of their stupidity by giving them bigger and bigger datasets - unless something fundamental changes soon that tech has an actual dead end. Hence my (joke-ish) prediction that you'll eventually need a 16PB GPU to run a basic gemini model, and such a thing will always be very expensive no matter how much our tech advances(especially since we are already hitting some technical limits). Human brains won't get any more expensive with time - they already contain all the hardware they are ever going to get - but what might get cheaper is the plumbing to make them "run" and interact with other systems.
Yeah, well, we have a very different view on this- and I know there are two diametrically opposed camps, and I am in the awe-struck one. LLMs are getting bigger and bigger and they're getting much smarter, and all in the space of a few years. They went from making up erratic articles about unicorns to writing complex PRs in codebases of millions of lines of code, solving math olympics level problems, speaking fluently in tens or hundreds of languages and exhibiting a breadth of knowledge than no human being possesses. Considering their size, they are monstrously efficient compared to the human brain. But anyway, this is a matter for a different discussion.
We can already grow brain organoids cheaply and easily enough to be a YouTuber's long-running series, so even if biological somehow gets cheaper than silicon, it still isn't going to be a revived complete human brain from someone who died 50 years earlier and probably retired 20 years before that.
I mean, imagine someone who got themselves cryonically preserved in 1976 getting either revived or uploaded today: what job would they be able to get? Almost no office job is the same now as then; manufacturing involves very different tools and a lot of CNC and robotic arms; agriculture is only getting more automated and we've had cow-milking robots for 20-30 years; cars may have changed the least in usage if not safety, performance, and power source; I suppose that leaves gardening… well, except for robot lawnmowers, anyone who can hire a gardener can probably afford a robo-mower?
Tldr is that for some very limited tasks it might still be preferable to use a human mind, especially if you can run it at 1000x cognitive speed. Or.....it might not. It's sci-fi at this point.
It shouldn't remind you of that, my point is there's little economic use for uploads like this: if thinking meat is cheaper than thinking silicon, train some fresh thinking meat with an electrode array or whatever; if thinking silicon is cheaper, train some fresh thinking silicon.
Non-economic use, that's different of course. Digital afterlife and so on, but as a consumer, not a supplier of anything.
It's the other way around, while initially it will only be available to elites and prisoners (if you are innocently convicted for life, the digitized brain can set the record straight and provide another life, some will take that option, others wont).
As the technology improves, it will be mostly just for the rich and less for prisoners, and as costs fall further there will even be financial pressure for the rest of the population to "go digital": insurance on digitized lifeforms will be much cheaper, replacement robot body parts, replacement electronics, versus expensive healthcare.
Look up the fraction of GDP in developed nations that goes to healthcare and insurance. People will be shamed by the economy as if they are uppity for hanging on to their slow, expensive to feed and maintain meatbag bodies.
> Each time the brain fails a captcha, the brain receives an electric impulse which simulates the most excruciating pain that the brain can respresent, but the brain cannot scream or run away.
What percentage of your life being enjoyable vs horrible suffering makes it worth living?
Maybe you're 80 years old at the time of storing your brain.
Suppose after being revived that regime with capitalist incentives holds for another 200 years during which you live as a brain in a jar, but some cultural revolutions later you are liberated and then proceed to live 10'000 years across any number of bodies and circumstances, which means that in your lifespan of ~10'280 years (not accounting for being in storage) you experienced horrible suffering for about 2% of your life.
This is as much of a contrived example as yours, aside from maybe good commentary on your part on human ethics being shit when profit enters the scene.
Or maybe after 200 years you expire, having at least tried your best at a non-zero chance of extending your lifespan, instead leading to your total lifespan of 280 years being about 71% suffering. Is it better to not have tried at all, then? Just forsake ANY chance of being revived and living for as long as you want and conquering biology and seeing so much more than your 80 year lifespan let you? Should absolute oblivion be chosen instead, willingly, a 100% chance of never having a conscious though after your death again (within our current medical understanding)?
What about the people dealing with all sorts of horrible illnesses and knowing that each next year might be spent in a lot of pain and suffering, even things like going through chemo? Should they also not try? Or even something as simple as all of the people who look for love/success in their lives, and never find any of it anyways and possibly die alone and in squalor? They knew the odds weren't good and tried anyways. A more grounded take would be that those preserved brains are just left to thaw and you probably die anyways without being turned into some human captcha machine, at least having tried. Is it also not worth it in that case, knowing those both potential alternatives?
I guess I'm not making a judgement of what other people should or shouldn't do. Just making up a goofy example to illustrate that the choice is not so obvious to a lot of people, which I think you also illustrate pretty well with your examples. It really depends on the individual. I do think it's worth looking at the incentives of the people funding these companies, because that does give a picture of the probable outcomes.
People will continue working on this sort of thing, that's fine, it really doesn't bother me. If I was forced to make a judgement, I think it's maybe a little silly, but I'm also not out there saving the planet from climate armageddon so I shouldn't cast stones. As a species we are extremely bad at prioritizing for our collective survival and there are a million worse things to be working on.
What percentage of your life being enjoyable vs horrible suffering makes it worth living? I don't know but 99% of my life being used to solve captchas makes it not worth living
>Suppose after being revived that regime with capitalist incentives
Having to provide for other people is literally the same as being trapped in a "I have no mouth and I must scream"-esque torture chamber. Given the historical track record of communism, you're more likely to end in the torture chamber than not in that situation. The curve of history bends towards factory farms.
I read your quote "Having to provide for other people is literally the same as being trapped in a "I have no mouth and I must scream"" and my brain immediately went to the millions of Americans working dead end jobs just to put food on the table for their family. It need not be communism for this to be a reality.
Not a chance. In fact all these developments make me convinced that my early choice for cremation over burial was and is the right one. Arrive blank and leave with grace, try to improve the world while you're here.
Already went through this exact process. It wasn't too bad but I think I got lucky this time. I celebrate the anniversary every year. Most of my memories were about how to walk and be afraid of animals with big teeth though.
Even in the best case scenario I would wake up in a world that barely makes any sense to me, where the things I cared about are long gone and nearly forgotten.
Imagine everyday waking up in a world that forgot the grammar you dream on. That's a curse.
I'm going to assume you mean this seriously, so I will answer with that in mind.
Yes, I can.
- I can build an unusual, but functional piece of furniture, not describe it, not design it. I can create a chair I can sit on it. An LLM is just an algorithm. I am a physically embodied intelligence in a physical world.
- I can write a good piece of fiction. LLMs have not demonstrated the ability to do that yet. They can write something similar, but it fails on multiple levels if you've been reading any of the most recent examples.
- I can produce a viable natural intelligence capable of doing anything human beings do (with a couple of decades of care, and training, and love). One of the perks of being a living organism, but that is an intrinsic part of what I am.
- I can have a novel thought, a feeling, based on qualia that arise from a system of hormones, physics, complex actions and inhibitors, outrageously diverse senses, memories, quirks. Few of which we've even begun to understand let alone simulate.
- And yes I can both count the 'r's in strawberry, and make you feel a reflection of the joy I feel when my granddaughter's eyes shine when she eats a fresh strawberry, and I think how close we came to losing her one night when someone put 90 rounds through the house next door, just a few feet from where her and her mother were sleeping.
So yeah, I'm sure I can create things an LLM can't.
So the only thing I am seeing here is physical or personal (I have no idea how you feel or what your emotions are. You are a black box just as an LLM is a black box.)
The only thing you mentioned is the fan fic and I would happily take the bet that an LLM could win out against a skilled person based on a blind vote.
I have --- set to autocorrect to —. I've been using it in formal writing for 30 years. When we were in high school, we had a "Dash Party" in English class, where we ate Twinkies and learned about the different dashes.
I would argue that LLMs overuse the emdash more because they overuse specific rhetorical devices, e.g. antithesis, than because they are being too correct about punctuation.
I'm a lifetime member and have enjoyed mynoise.net for many years. It's the best thing I've found for focus and distraction blocking. I have brain.fm, and YouTube music, but I keep coming back to his site because it's just better, more intentional, and more effective for me.
I loved my TI-99/4A. I used to think it was ahead of its time, but now I realize it was from an altogether alternate timeline where we built stuff to work.
This captures something I've been struggling to describe, and "Whatever" is the perfect term for this.
Private Equity & Financialization: Whatever for business
Flood the Zone & Deadcatting: "Whatever" for politics
It's what I think about when I hear all of the "AI is going to eliminate all the jobs." That's just a convenient cover story for "Tax laws changed so R&D isn't free money anymore, and we need to fire everyone."
When almost every drop of wealth is in the control of a tiny number of people, it's not surprising that the world turns into one big competition for ways to convince those people that you have a way for them to sop up the remaining thimbleful too.
That's definitely how we worked at the Sun offices. And since we hoteled, I never knew where I would be sitting. I loved it really. It felt very minimalist and slick.
It's interesting that your experience is different, but in my region and social circles, I haven't seen anyone wear a watch in ten years or more, other than the occasional smart watch. That habit doesn't seem to last long, either. For people I know, watches have turned into fashion accessories for millionaires.
> other than the occasional smart watch. That habit doesn't seem to last long, either.
I'm gonna go on a whim and say the habit doesn't last cause you cannot truly depend on them. My watch never leaves my wrist, it never fails me, it is just a "dumb" one.
I wear a watch. Nothing fancy, but I do have a few of them (and none worth more than 2-£300.) it’s about the only accessory I wear so it’s nice to have some variety. My day to day is a smart watch (and has been for a few years now).
Lots of my circle is similar.
Do you take the deal? Do you sign your family up for it?
reply