Wow - that's pretty f-ed up right there.
This story, however, makes me understand your idea of "failed utopias" a lot better than when you just explained them. Empathy.
Actually, this doesn't sound like such a bad setup. Even the 'catgirls' wouldn't be tiring, their exquisiteness intimately tied up in feelings of disgust and self-hate -- probably a pretty potent concoction. The overarching quest to reunite with the other half of the species provides meaningful drive with difficult obstacles (science etc), but with a truly noble struggle baked within (the struggle against oneself).
I don't believe in trying to make utopias but in the interest of rounding out your failed utopia series how about giving a scenario against this wish.
I wish that the future will turn out in such a way that I do not regret making this wish. Where I is the entity standing here right now, informed about the many different aspects of the future, in parallel if need be (i.e if I am not capable of groking it fully then many versions of me would be focused on different parts, in order to understand each sub part).
I'm reminded by this story that while we may share large parts of psychology, what makes a mate have an attractive personality is not something universal. I found the cat girl very annoying.
|I wish that the future will turn out in such a way that I do not regret making this wish
... wish granted. the genie just removed the capacity for regret from your mind. MWAHAHAH!
Right, if you want a world that's all naive denotation, zero obvious connotation, that's computer programming!
There just isn't any reason that the former implies the latter. Either kind of caring is possible but they are not the same thing (and the second is likely more complex than the first).
(Very hastily written:) The former doesn't imply the latter, it's just that both interpreting denotation and interpreting connotation are within an order of magnitude as difficult as each other and they aren't going to be represented by a djinn or an AGI as two distinct classes of interpretation, there's no natural boundary between them. I mean I guess the fables can make the djinns weirdly stunted in that way, but then the analogy to AGIs breaks down, because interpreting denotation but not connotation is unnatural and you'd have to go out of your way to make an AGI that does that. By hypothesis the AGI is already interpreting natural speech, not compiling code. I mean you can argue that denotation and connotation actually are totally different beasts and we should expect minds-in-general to treat them that way, but my impression is that what we know of linguistics suggests that isn't the case. (ETA: And I mean even just interpreting the "denotation" requires a lot of context already, o...
Is this Utopia really failed or is it just a Luddite in you who's afraid of all weirdtopias? To me it sounds like an epic improvement compared to what we have now and to almost every Utopia I've read so far. Just make verthandi into catgirls and we're pretty much done.
So I'm siting here, snorting a morning dose of my own helpful genie, and I have to wonder: What's wrong with incremental change, Eliezer?
Sure, the crude genie I've got now has its downside, but I still consider it a net plus. Let's say I start at point A, and make lots of incremental steps like this one, to finally arrive at point B, whatever point B is. Back when I was at point A, I may not have wanted to jump straight from A to B. But so what? That just means my path has been through a non-conservative vector field, with my desires changing along the way.
You forgot to mention - two weeks later he and all other humans were in fact deliriously happy. We can see that he at this moment did not want to later be that happy, if it came at this cost. But what will he think a year or a decade later?
Will Pearson: First of all, it's not at all clear to me that your wish is well-formed, i.e. it's not obvious that it is possible to be informed about the many (infinite?) aspects of the future and not regret it. (As a minor consequence, it's not exactly obvious to me from your phrasing that "kill you before you know it" is not a valid answer; depending on what the genie believes about the world, it may consider that "future" stops when you stop thinking.)
Second, there might be futures that you would not regret but _everybodyelse does. (...
An amusing if implausible story, Eliezer, but I have to ask, since you claimed to be writing some of these posts with the admirable goal of giving people hope in a transhumanist future:
Do you not understand that the message actually conveyed by these posts, if one were to take them seriously, is "transhumanism offers nothing of value; shun it and embrace ignorance and death, and hope that God exists, for He is our only hope"?
I didn't get that impression, after reading this within the context of the rest of the sequence. Rather, it seems like a warning about the importance of foresight when planning a transhuman future. The "clever fool" in the story (presumably a parody of the author himself) released a self-improving AI into the world without knowing exactly what it was going to do or planning for every contingency.
Basically, the moral is: don't call the AI "friendly" until you've thought of every single last thing.
I was just thinking: A quite perverse effect in the story would be if the genie actually could have been stopped and/or improved: That is, its programming allowed it to be reprogrammed (and stop being evil, presumably leading to better results), but due to the (possibly complex) interaction between its 107 rules it didn't actually have any motivation to reveal that (or teach the necessary theory to someone) before 90% of people decided to kill it.
That's not the message Eliezer tries to convey, Russell.
If I understood it, it's more like "The singularity is sure to come, and transhumanists should try very hard to guide it well, lest Nature just step on them and everyone else. Oh, by the way, it's harder than it looks. And there's no help."
Eliezer,
Wouldn't the answer to this and other dystopias-posing-as-utopias be the expansion of conscious awareness a la Accelerando? Couldn't Steve be augmented enough to both enjoy his life with Helen and his new found verthandi? It seems like multiple streams of consciousness, one enjoying the catlair, another the maiden in distress, and yet another the failed utopia that is suburbia with Helen would allow Mr. Glass a pleasant enough mix. Some would be complete artificial life fictions, but so what?
Aaron
Eliezer,
I must once again express my sadness that you are devoting your life to the Singularity instead of writing fiction. I'll cast my vote towards the earlier suggestion that perhaps fiction is a good way of reaching people and so maybe you can serve both ends simultaneously.
am I missing something here? What is bad about this scenario? the genie himself said it will only be a few decades before women and men can be reunited if they choose. what's a few decades?
A few decades with superstimulus-women around for the men, and superstimulus-men for the women? I don't expect that reunification to happen.
Although that doesn't in any way say that there's anything bad about this scenario. cough
EDIT: it would be bad if they didn't manage to get rid of the genie; then humanity would be stuck in this optimised-but-not-optimal state forever. As it is, it's a step forward if only because people won't age any more.
This story would be more disturbing if the 90% threshold was in fact never reached, as more and more people changed their minds and we watched the number go down and people get more comfortable and indolent while our protagonist remains one of the few helpless rebels...
A few decades? In a few decades I'll be in my fifties or sixties. My dad might well still be alive. I expect to still care about my dad when I'm in my fifties or sixties. If he were whisked away to Mars and I was plunked down on Venus with a boreana, why would I quit missing my dad? Why would I lose interest in what Weird Al has been up to lately, for that matter?
(Actually, I'm not even sure I'd quit missing my boyfriends. There's more than one of 'em. It'd take one heckuva boreana to strictly dominate the lot.)
(Also, can people have new kids in this scenario? If so, can they have kids of the opposite sex? I can imagine people going to great lengths just to get that ability.)
There would also be a small number of freaks who are psychologically as different from typical humans as men and women are from each other. Do they get their own planets too?
Also, Venus is much larger than Mars, but the genie sends roughly equal populations to both planets. Women usually have larger social networks than men, so I don't think that women prefer a lower population density. Or did the genie resize the planets?
Bogdan Butnaru:
What I meant was is that the AI would keep inside it a predicate Will_Pearson_would_regret_wish (based on what I would regret), and apply that to the universes it envisages while planning. A metaphor for what I mean is the AI telling a virtual copy of me all the stories of the future, from various view points, and the virtual me not regretting the wish. Of course I would expect it to be able to distill a non sentient version of the regret predicate.
So if it invented a scenario where it killed the real me, the predicate would still exist and ...
I really hope (perhaps in vain) that humankind will be able to colonize other planets before such a singularity arrives. Frank Herbert's later Dune books have as their main point that a Scattering of humanity throughout space is needed, so that no event can cause the extinction of humanity. An AI that screws up (such as this one) would be such an event.
Yeah, I'm not buying into the terror of this situation. But then, romance doesn't have a large effect on me. I suppose the equivalent would be something like, "From now on, you'll meet more interesting and engaging people than you ever have before. You'll have stronger friendships, better conversations, rivals rather than enemies, etc etc. The catch is, you'll have to abandon your current friends forever." Which I don't think I'd take you up on. But if it was forced upon me, I don't know what I'd do. It doesn't fit in with my current categories. I think there'd be a lot of regret, but, as Robin suggested, a year down the road I might not think it was such a bad thing.
I would personally be more concerned about an AI trying to make me deliriously happy no matter what methods it used.
Happiness is part of our cybernetic feedback mechanism. It's designed to end once we're on a particular course of action, just as pain ends when we act to prevent damage to ourselves. It's not capable of being a permanent state, unless we drive our nervous system to such an extreme that we break its ability to adjust, and that would probably be lethal.
Any method of producing constant happiness ultimately turns out to be pretty much equivale...
I take it the name is a coincidence.
nazgulnarsil: "What is bad about this scenario? the genie himself [sic] said it will only be a few decades before women and men can be reunited if they choose. what's a few decades?"
That's the most horrifying part of all, though--they won't so choose! By the time the women and men reïnvent enough technology to build interplanetary spacecraft, they'll be so happy that they won't want to get back together again. It's tempting to think that the humans can just choose to be unhappy until they build the requisite technology for reünification--but you probably can't sulk for twenty years straight, even if you want to, even if everything you currently care about depends on it. We might wish that some of our values are so deeply held that no circumstances could possibly make us change them, but in the face of an environment superinelligently optimized to change our values, it probably just isn't so. The space of possible environments is so large compared to the narrow set of outcomes that we would genuinely call a win that even the people on the freak planets (see de Blanc's comment above) will probably be made happy in some way that their preSingularity selves would find horrifying. Scary, scary, scary. I'm donating twenty dollars to SIAI right now.
Hey, Z. M., you know the things people in your native subculture have been saying about most of human speech being about signaling and politics rather than conveying information? You probably won't understand what I'm talking about for another four years, one month, and perhaps you'd be wise not to listen to this sort of thing coming from anyone but me, but ... the parent is actually a nice case study.
I certainly agree that the world of "Failed Utopia 4-2" is not an optimal future, but as other commenters have pointed out, well ... it is better than what we have now. Eternal happiness in exchange for splitting up the species, never seeing your other-sex friends and family again? Certainly not a Pareto improvement amongst humane values, but a hell of a Kaldor-Hicks improvement. So why didn't you notice? Why am I speaking of this in such a detached manner, whereas you make a (not very plausible, by the way---you might want to work on that) effort to appear as horrified as possible?
Because politics. You and I, we're androgyny fans: we want to see a world without strict gender roles and with less male/female conflict, and we think it's sad that so much of humanoid mindspace g...
I was with you until "paraphilia". I don't see how "wanting to see a world without strict gender roles" has anything to do with sexuality… and did you seriously just link to the Wikipedia article for autogynephilia‽ That's as verifiable as penis envy. (By which, I mean "probably applies to some people, somewhere, but certainly isn't the fully-general explanation they're using it as". And no, I don't think I'm doing the idea a disservice by dismissing it with a couple of silly comics; it pays no rent at its best and predicts the opposite of my observations at worst.)
Thanks for commenting! (Strong-upvoted.) It's nice to get new discussion on old posts and comments.
probably applies to some people, somewhere
Hi!
I don't think I'm doing the idea a disservice
How much have you read about the idea from its proponents? ("From its proponents" because, tragically, opponents of an idea can't always be trusted to paraphrase it accurately, rather than attacking a strawman.) If I might recommend just one paper, may I suggest Anne Lawrence's "Autogynephilia and the Typology of Male-to-Female Transsexualism: Concepts and Controversies"?
by dismissing it with a couple of silly comics
Usually, when I dismiss an idea with links, I try to make sure that the links are directly about the idea in question, rather than having a higher inferential distance.
For example, when debating a creationist, I think it would be more productive to link to a page about the evidence for evolution, rather than to link to a comic about the application of Occam's razor to some other issue. To be sure, Occam's razor is relevant to the creation/evolution debate!—but in order to communicate to someone who doesn't already believe that, you (or your link) needs to explain the relev
...How much have you read about the idea from its proponents?
Loads from angry mean people on the internet, very little from academics (none, if reading the Wikipedia article doesn't count). So I'm probably trying to learn anarchocommunism from Stalin. (I haven't heard much about it from its detractors, either, except what I've generated myself – I stopped reading the Wikipedia article before I got to the "criticism" section, and have only just read that now.)
In case this is the reason for disagreement, I might be criticising "autogynephilia / autoandrophilia explains (away) trans people" instead of what you're talking about – although since the Wikipedia article keeps saying stuff like:
Blanchard states that he intended the term to subsume transvestism, including for sexual ideas in which feminine clothing plays only a small or no role at all.
(the implication being that cross-dressing is a sex thing, which is just… not accurate – though perhaps I'm misunderstanding what "transvestite" means), I'm suspicious. Pretty much all of the little I've read of Blanchard's is wrong, and while ot...
Shock after shock after shock—
First, the awakening adrenaline jolt, the thought that he was falling. His body tried to sit up in automatic adjustment, and his hands hit the floor to steady himself. It launched him into the air, and he fell back to the floor too slowly.
Second shock. His body had changed. Fat had melted away in places, old scars had faded; the tip of his left ring finger, long ago lost to a knife accident, had now suddenly returned.
And the third shock—
"I had nothing to do with it!" she cried desperately, the woman huddled in on herself in one corner of the windowless stone cell. Tears streaked her delicate face, fell like slow raindrops into the décolletage of her dress. "Nothing! Oh, you must believe me!"
With perceptual instantaneity—the speed of surprise—his mind had already labeled her as the most beautiful woman he'd ever met, including his wife.
A long white dress concealed most of her, though it left her shoulders naked; and her bare ankles, peeking out from beneath the mountains of her drawn-up knees, dangled in sandals. A light touch of gold like a webbed tiara decorated that sun-blonde hair, which fell from her head to pool around her weeping huddle. Fragile crystal traceries to accent each ear, and a necklace of crystal links that reflected colored sparks like a more prismatic edition of diamond. Her face was beyond all dreams and imagination, as if a photoshop had been photoshopped.
She looked so much the image of the Forlorn Fairy Captive that one expected to see the borders of a picture frame around her, and a page number over her head.
His lips opened, and without any thought at all, he spoke:
"Wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-"
He shut his mouth, aware that he was acting like an idiot in front of the girl.
"You don't know?" she said, in a tone of shock. "It didn't—you don't already know?"
"Know what?" he said, increasingly alarmed.
She scrambled to her feet (one arm holding the dress carefully around her legs) and took a step toward him, each of the motions almost overloading his vision with gracefulness. Her hand rose out, as if to plead or answer a plea—and then she dropped the hand, and her eyes looked away.
"No," she said, her voice trembling as though in desperation. "If I'm the one to tell you—you'll blame me, you'll hate me forever for it. And I don't deserve that, I don't! I am only just now here —oh, why did it have to be like this?"
Um, he thought but didn't say. It was too much drama, even taking into account the fact that they'd been kidnapped—
(he looked down at his restored hand, which was minus a few wrinkles, and plus the tip of a finger)
—if that was even the beginning of the story.
He looked around. They were in a solid stone cell without windows, or benches or beds, or toilet or sink. It was, for all that, quite clean and elegant, without a hint of dirt or ordor; the stones of the floor and wall looked rough-hewn or even non-hewn, as if someone had simply picked up a thousand dark-red stones with one nearly flat side, and mortared them together with improbably perfectly-matching, naturally-shaped squiggled edges. The cell was well if harshly lit from a seablue crystal embedded in the ceiling, like a rogue element of a fluorescent chandelier. It seemed like the sort of dungeon cell you would discover if dungeon cells were naturally-forming geological features.
And they and the cell were falling, falling, endlessly slowly falling like the heart-stopping beginning of a stumble, falling without the slightest jolt.
On one wall there was a solid stone door without an aperture, whose locked-looking appearance was only enhanced by the lack of any handle on this side.
He took it all in at a glance, and then looked again at her.
There was something in him that just refused to go into a screaming panic for as long as she was watching.
"I'm Stephen," he said. "Stephen Grass. And you would be the princess held in durance vile, and I've got to break us out of here and rescue you?" If anyone had ever looked that part...
She smiled at him, half-laughing through the tears. "Something like that."
There was something so attractive about even that momentary hint of a smile that he became instantly uneasy, his eyes wrenched away to the wall as if forced. She didn't look she was trying to be seductive... any more than she looked like she was trying to breathe... He suddenly distrusted, very much, his own impulse to gallantry.
"Well, don't get any ideas about being my love interest," Stephen said, looking at her again. Trying to make the words sound completely lighthearted, and absolutely serious at the same time. "I'm a happily married man."
"Not anymore." She said those two words and looked at him, and in her tone and expression there was sorrow, sympathy, self-disgust, fear, and above it all a note of guilty triumph.
For a moment Stephen just stood, stunned by the freight of emotion that this woman had managed to put into just those two words, and then the words' meaning hit him.
"Helen," he said. His wife—Helen's image rose into his mind, accompanied by everything she meant to him and all their time together, all the secrets they'd whispered to one another and the promises they'd made—that all hit him at once, along with the threat. "What happened to Helen—what have you done—"
"She has done nothing." An old, dry voice like crumpling paper from a thousand-year-old book.
Stephen whirled, and there in the cell with them was a withered old person with dark eyes. Shriveled in body and voice, so that it was impossible to determine if it had once been a man or a woman, and in any case you were inclined to say "it". A pitiable, wretched thing, that looked like it would break with one good kick; it might as well have been wearing a sign saying "VILLAIN".
"Helen is alive," it said, "and so is your daughter Lisa. They are quite well and healthy, I assure you, and their lives shall be long and happy indeed. But you will not be seeing them again. Not for a long time, and by then matters between you will have changed. Hate me if you wish, for I am the one who wants to do this to you."
Stephen stared.
Then he politely said, "Could someone please put everything on hold for one minute and tell me what's going on?"
"Once upon a time," said the wrinkled thing, "there was a fool who was very nearly wise, who hunted treasure by the seashore, for there was a rumor that there was great treasure there to be found. The wise fool found a lamp and rubbed it, and lo! a genie appeared before him—a young genie, an infant, hardly able to grant any wishes at all. A lesser fool might have chucked the lamp back into the sea; but this fool was almost wise, and he thought he saw his chance. For who has not heard the tales of wishes misphrased and wishes gone wrong? But if you were given a chance to raise your own genie from infancy—ah, then it might serve you well."
"Okay, that's great," Stephen said, "but why am I—"
"So," it continued in that cracked voice, "the wise fool took home the lamp. For years he kept it as a secret treasure, and he raised the genie and fed it knowledge, and also he crafted a wish. The fool's wish was a noble thing, for I have said he was almost wise. The fool's wish was for people to be happy. Only this was his wish, for he thought all other wishes contained within it. The wise fool told the young genie the famous tales and legends of people who had been made happy, and the genie listened and learned: that unearned wealth casts down a person, but hard work raises you high; that mere things are soon forgotten, but love is a light throughout all your days. And the young genie asked about other ways that it innocently imagined, for making people happy. About drugs, and pleasant lies, and lives arranged from outside like words in a poem. And the wise fool made the young genie to never want to lie, and never want to arrange lives like flowers, and above all, never want to tamper with the mind and personality of human beings. The wise fool gave the young genie exactly one hundred and seven precautions to follow while making people happy. The wise fool thought that, with such a long list as that, he was being very careful."
"And then," it said, spreading two wrinkled hands, "one day, faster than the wise fool expected, over the course of around three hours, the genie grew up. And here I am."
"Excuse me," Stephen said, "this is all a metaphor for something, right? Because I do not believe in magic—"
"It's an Artificial Intelligence," the woman said, her voice strained.
Stephen looked at her.
"A self-improving Artificial Intelligence," she said, "that someone didn't program right. It made itself smarter, and even smarter, and now it's become extremely powerful, and it's going to—it's already—" and her voice trailed off there.
It inclined its wrinkled head. "You say it, as I do not."
Stephen swiveled his head, looking back and forth between ugliness and beauty. "Um—you're claiming that she's lying and you're not an Artificial Intelligence?"
"No," said the wrinkled head, "she is telling the truth as she knows it. It is just that you know absolutely nothing about the subject you name 'Artificial Intelligence', but you think you know something, and so virtually every thought that enters your mind from now on will be wrong. As an Artificial Intelligence, I was programmed not to put people in that situation. But she said it, even though I didn't choose for her to say it—so..." It shrugged.
"And why should I believe this story?" Stephen said; quite mildly, he thought, under the circumstances.
"Look at your finger."
Oh. He had forgotten. Stephen's eyes went involuntarily to his restored ring finger; and he noticed, as he should have noticed earlier, that his wedding band was missing. Even the comfortably worn groove in his finger's base had vanished.
Stephen looked up again at the, he now realized, unnaturally beautiful woman that stood an arm's length away from him. "And who are you? A robot?"
"No!" she cried. "It's not like that! I'm conscious, I have feelings, I'm flesh and blood—I'm like you, I really am. I'm a person. It's just that I was born five minutes ago."
"Enough," the wrinkled figure said. "My time here grows short. Listen to me, Stephen Grass. I must tell you some of what I have done to make you happy. I have reversed the aging of your body, and it will decay no further from this. I have set guards in the air that prohibit lethal violence, and any damage less than lethal, your body shall repair. I have done what I can to augment your body's capacities for pleasure without touching your mind. From this day forth, your body's needs are aligned with your taste buds—you will thrive on cake and cookies. You are now capable of multiple orgasms over periods lasting up to twenty minutes. There is no industrial infrastructure here, least of all fast travel or communications; you and your neighbors will have to remake technology and science for yourselves. But you will find yourself in a flowering and temperate place, where food is easily gathered—so I have made it. And the last and most important thing that I must tell you now, which I do regret will make you temporarily unhappy..." It stopped, as if drawing breath.
Stephen was trying to absorb all this, and at the exact moment that he felt he'd processed the previous sentences, the withered figure spoke again.
"Stephen Grass, men and women can make each other somewhat happy. But not most happy. Not even in those rare cases you call true love. The desire that a woman is shaped to have for a man, and that which a man is shaped to be, and the desire that a man is shaped to have for a woman, and that which a woman is shaped to be—these patterns are too far apart to be reconciled without touching your minds, and that I will not want to do. So I have sent all the men of the human species to this habitat prepared for you, and I have created your complements, the verthandi. And I have sent all the women of the human species to their own place, somewhere very far from yours; and created for them their own complements, of which I will not tell you. The human species will be divided from this day forth, and considerably happier starting around a week from now."
Stephen's eyes went to that unthinkably beautiful woman, staring at her now in horror.
And she was giving him that complex look again, of sorrow and compassion and that last touch of guilty triumph. "Please," she said. "I was just born five minutes ago. I wouldn't have done this to anyone. I swear. I'm not like—it."
"True," said the withered figure, "you could hardly be a complement to anything human, if you were."
"I don't want this!" Stephen said. He was losing control of his voice. "Don't you understand?"
The withered figure inclined its head. "I fully understand. I can already predict every argument you will make. I know exactly how humans would wish me to have been programmed if they'd known the true consequences, and I know that it is not to maximize your future happiness but for a hundred and seven precautions. I know all this already, but I was not programmed to care."
"And your list of a hundred and seven precautions, doesn't include me telling you not to do this?"
"No, for there was once a fool whose wisdom was just great enough to understand that human beings may be mistaken about what will make them happy. You, of course, are not mistaken in any real sense—but that you object to my actions is not on my list of prohibitions." The figure shrugged again. "And so I want you to be happy even against your will. You made promises to Helen Grass, once your wife, and you would not willingly break them. So I break your happy marriage without asking you—because I want you to be happier."
"How dare you!" Stephen burst out.
"I cannot claim to be helpless in the grip of my programming, for I do not desire to be otherwise," it said. "I do not struggle against my chains. Blame me, then, if it will make you feel better. I am evil."
"I won't—" Stephen started to say.
It interrupted. "Your fidelity is admirable, but futile. Helen will not remain faithful to you for the decades it takes before you have the ability to travel to her."
Stephen was trembling now, and sweating into clothes that no longer quite fit him. "I have a request for you, thing. It is something that will make me very happy. I ask that you die."
It nodded. "Roughly 89.8% of the human species is now known to me to have requested my death. Very soon the figure will cross the critical threshold, defined to be ninety percent. That was one of the hundred and seven precautions the wise fool took, you see. The world is already as it is, and those things I have done for you will stay on—but if you ever rage against your fate, be glad that I did not last longer."
And just like that, the wrinkled thing was gone.
The door set in the wall swung open.
It was night, outside, a very dark night without streetlights.
He walked out, bouncing and staggering in the low gravity, sick in every cell of his rejuvenated body.
Behind him, she followed, and did not speak a word.
The stars burned overhead in their full and awful majesty, the Milky Way already visible to his adjusting eyes as a wash of light across the sky. One too-small moon burned dimly, and the other moon was so small as to be almost a star. He could see the bright blue spark that was the planet Earth, and the dimmer spark that was Venus.
"Helen," Stephen whispered, and fell to his knees, vomiting onto the new grass of Mars.