06-18-2023, 03:11 PM
(This post was last modified: 06-18-2023, 03:46 PM by ProxCenBound.)
I don't agree with Scott Alexander on a number of issues, but I think his review of this book made some very good points: https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/05/28/bo...age-of-em/
Overall the em world, where vast populations are naturally-selected to be interested almost entirely in doing work, strikes me as the sort of place that the OA setting would consider a blight, to be contained or even liberated or destroyed depending on which archai you ask. Scott Alexander posits an even more extreme version (and possibly more plausible, in some sense) in which all conscious thought is selected out in favor of an fully automated economy with no conscious morally-significant agents remaining. This would almost certainly be considered a blight in OA.
Likely there is further good potential for worldbuilding inspiration here.
Also, along these lines, I found this short dystopian/horror story (in the style of a Wikipedia article) depicting an upload treated as a computer program to be very well written (and sobering): https://qntm.org/mmacevedo
Overall the em world, where vast populations are naturally-selected to be interested almost entirely in doing work, strikes me as the sort of place that the OA setting would consider a blight, to be contained or even liberated or destroyed depending on which archai you ask. Scott Alexander posits an even more extreme version (and possibly more plausible, in some sense) in which all conscious thought is selected out in favor of an fully automated economy with no conscious morally-significant agents remaining. This would almost certainly be considered a blight in OA.
Likely there is further good potential for worldbuilding inspiration here.
Also, along these lines, I found this short dystopian/horror story (in the style of a Wikipedia article) depicting an upload treated as a computer program to be very well written (and sobering): https://qntm.org/mmacevedo