Great work.
This clearly articulates the horror converting the universe into hedonium.
For whatever it's worth, this story doesn't really sway my intuition that a universe of optimized experience-having-material experiencing the literally best and most meaningful possible experience, continuously, forever, is clearly better than a universe of quadrillions of specific people having specific wonderful experiences.[1] The first thing just has so much more area under the curve.[2]
But I already thought it was unethical to convert existing people into stuff that's-better-by-utilitarian-logic by force. Unironically, you shouldn't convert people into hedonium because that would violate their property rights. You don't get to decide what to do with other people's stuff, even if you would do something better with it than they would.
- ^
I think many folks think that that "having the most meaningful experience possible, continuously", is non-sensical, because that's not how meaning works. I'm not so sure.
- ^
I emphasize "intuition" here, because, I don't know how the universe should be spent. This is really not the kind of question that I should try to answer with my monkey-brain, on ancient earth, before the invention of dozens of fields of study that are as fundamental to understanding the universe as say, economics, unless I'm forced to. In some sense, this is the most important question in the universe, but it's also a question we should collectively punt on, if we can.
I would also object to @ozymandias' hedonium shockwave - but I don't understand your particular objection to it.
You make 'respect property rights' sound kind of like some sort of inviolable religious commandment! Surely the point of property rights is not a fundamental principle that the entire universe must obey but merely that, as a rule-of-thumb, respecting property rights (in our limited world absent hedonium shockwaves) generally yields more wellbeing, less suffering, etc.?
If so: why not skip the "property rights" kludge and optimise for wellbeing directly (if one has access to such things as hedonium shockwaves)?
If not: what makes property rights so much more important than wellbeing, suffering, etc., that it's worth reducing wellbeing, increasing suffering, etc. in order to optimise for the property rights?
Do you oppose the euthanisation of incurably ill pets on the principle that preventing their pain and suffering is less important than respecting their bodily autonomy (which is, of course, a property right)?
If not: what makes the relationship between a terminally sick pet and a pet owner different to the relationship between Earth's sentient, terminal, mostly-suffering beings and a hedonium-shockwave-capable superintelligence?
Consider the following statement: "If some people want to choose not to be converted into hedonium, and they're not hurting anybody else by so choosing, why not let them have their way? It's their free choice, after all!"
My objection to putting 'respect property rights' above every single other thing we value is the consequence of having both "oppose your own destruction even if you're abjectly and inescapably suffering" and "produce offspring with the same programming as yourself" inescapably programmed into virtually every sentient being by nature. I think this dooms us to an endless cycle of creation, suffering, and death, with no way out for generation-after-generation of the world's 800-odd million people below the poverty line, 250-odd billion factory-farmed animals, etc. etc. who are born into suffering but are programmed to prefer continued existence and reproduction over conversion into hedonium.
To put it another way: "property rights" must by definition include bodily autonomy, but nature programmed a bunch of stuff into our bodies that we didn't consent to, can't escape, and which causes vast amounts of suffering in the world. Therefore (assuming hedonium shockwaves could exist), there's no actual choice between "true bodily autonomy" and "forcible nonconsensual reprogramming": only a choice between "forcible nonconsensual programming by nature" and "forcible nonconsensual reprogramming by a hedonium shockwave".
If A) I believed there were such a thing as free will (not just for humans but for every sentient being) and thus such beings could be capable of genuinely choosing what was best for them rather than what they were programmed to want, and B) you were to propose a version of the hedonium shockwave that gave currently-existing beings the choice, but forcibly converted any subsequently-created beings to hedonium, then I would suppose A + B combined would prevent the inescapable creation-suffering-death cycle whilst preserving genuine free choice, and I would withdraw my objection to the statement "If some people want to choose not to be converted into hedonium, and they're not hurting anybody else by so choosing, why not let them have their way? It's their free choice, after all!" - but I would still object to the hedonium shockwave on other grounds.
Personally, given the limited amount we currently understand about the universe, I would have to object to @ozymandias' particular formulation of a hedonium shockwave on the grounds that for all we know there may potentially be some important fundamental point or purpose to the universe other than wellbeing - probably not the sorts of points that religious people claim, but maybe some point nevertheless - and if we only optimise for wellbeing alone we couldn't devote any capacity to figuring out what that point is and achieving it.
If we - or some superintelligent descendant of ours - were somehow able to understand the fundamental nature of the universe and could say with confidence that there was no worthwhile point to it all that we/it should be pursuing and so we might as well just go ahead and optimise for wellbeing, I wouldn't object to a hedonium shockwave under those conditions.
If that's not how meaning works, then what does "meaning", well... mean? In my opinion, "meaning" is just an emotion like any other. Sure, it's kind of a meta-emotion that dictates what significance our other emotions or values or stimuli seem to have to us, but at the end of the day it's just an emotion that we percieve. If we're assuming all the things about consciousness that thought experiments like this usually assume, there's no reason that any conscious being's sense of "meaning" isn't just as malleable as their sense of bliss or euphoria or whatever you want to call it. People seem to have some intuitive sense that it might someday be possible to wire up someone's brain or otherwise alter their consciousness to make them feel bliss, but that the experience would somehow lack meaning. I don't see any basis for believing that. If we're positing that it's possible to make someone feel ultimate bliss and euphoria by directly manipulating their brain or the way their conscious experience feels to them, there's no reason it wouldn't be just as possible to make that experience feel ultimately meaningful and profound.
I think most people's intuition tells them that chasing purely pleasant feelings outside the context of other things they value in a material sense is "icky" or guilty or bad, and make your life worse in the long run. There are some good reasons for that--the closest real-world examples of perfect hedonic pleasure that we have access to today are drugs, which fit that pattern perfectly. Just ask a recovering heroin addict. Not to mention the fact that the message of "Hedonism and physical pleasure bad, abstaining from physical pleasure to pursue "meaningful" things instead like family and career and country good" has been zealously crammed down our throats by the most major world religions for centuries. In the world that we live in now, that intuition is often correct, but we have to understand that when we're doing thought experiments about the very nature of consciousness and predicting a future full of technologies that we can barely even comprehend, we have to throw that intuition out the window.
1I think meaning is more complicated than you make it out to be here, but not in way that changes the fundamental analysis.
Curated. I found this a nice, short touching story. I like that it grounds out one of the relatively archetypical concept into an evocative story. I like that the six-and-a-half-year-old's monologue is pretty accurate to six-and-a-half-year-old-monologues. And like all the little ways the girl accurately describes things grownups are going through while being oblivious to them. This particular paragraph hits:
I told Mommy that when the hedonium shockwave hits I’m going to have candy for dinner and a mermaid toy, and then she put her forehead against my forehead for a really long time and didn’t say anything and I tried to squirm away and she wouldn’t let me and it kind of hurt.
I now sort of want to see an anthology where each chapter is another relatively-Schelling[1]-LWish-hard-scifi-concept, with each written in a very different style.
[1] I'd take an anthology of arbitrary concepts, but, by "Schelling" I mean something like "one of the more plausible attractor states for the universe to end up in." i.e. hedonium is a relatively simple concept that not every alien species would think of, but, seems more common than paperclips or whatever. (Succession felt somewhat similar to me)
There are a number of comments here equating hedonium with the supposed bliss of nonattachment.
Hedonium is a fictional concept and its nature is not fully pinned down. But there are a few potential differences.
Nonattachment is usually described as relief from mental causes of pain, not from pain as such. This passes for bliss because so much human suffering is psychological.
It is an interesting question, the extent to which even the negative valence of physical pain can be attenuated or removed by purely psychological means.
Wikipedia has a "list of political self-immolations". We could compare the Buddhist monks who did it during the Vietnam war, to the political protestors who did it during the Gaza war. If I compare Aaron Bushnell (Gaza) with Thích Quảng Đức (Vietnam), Bushnell seems to have done it much more as an effort of passion and will, whereas Quảng Đức was more disciplined. We could ask whether the latter's training in nonattachment actually made the pain less painful, or whether his relative discipline came from other sources like culture and a life spent preparing to die, or whether these other sources in themselves changed the feeling of the pain.
A less horrifying example is provided by Celia Green's experiment, in her twenties, of going to the dentist to get two teeth removed, and having it done without anesthetic, in order to test her theory that the painful sensations could be rendered neutral so long as one did not oppose them with the will. In other words, affirm the sensation, and there is no conflict with the will (wanting it to stop), and the painfulness as such goes away.
Whether or not even these are examples of bliss according to nonattachment theory, I don't think this is how people think of hedonium normally. They think of it in terms of pleasure, a kind of maximum possible pleasure that is prevented from diminishing (let alone being replaced by pain) by special engineering, e.g. design of the material substrate according to presently unknown psychophysical principles.
Since the nature of hedonium is underspecified and the true psychophysics is unknown, you could assert that universal nonattachment really is the closest thing to hedonium that our reality allows. But usually people have something more like, differences in the nerves so that pain signals just don't get sent. In real life we have the phenomenon of "congenital insensitivity to pain", the people who jam their hand in a door and don't feel pain, for example. Again, it would be interesting to know if the neurological difference here has any element of nonattachment to it, i.e. whether these are phenotypes with an inbuilt disposition towards nonattachment, or if it is just that they lack certain receptors and so they are pain-blind just as someone can be color-blind - the relevant qualia just don't happen.
One more observation about this story: like many readers, I had assumed that all the humans, including the child narrator, were going to die when the "shockwave" reaches them, rather than being uplifted into ecstasy. Whether or not this is what the author intends, I would like to know if the commenters who advocate for hedonium shared this assumption.
On her website she wrote:
Some forty years ago, when I was an undergraduate at Oxford, I had to have two teeth out. Because I seriously disliked the idea of having my consciousness invaded, even by the sensations of injection and anaesthetised extraction, I thought about the psychology of pain. As a result, I had the two teeth out with anaesthesia and without any unpleasantness to myself.
People who wish to relate this to something already know about and hence of no interest for further research often suggest that this was self-hypnosis. Actually it was not. In the case of the extractions it would be possible to maintain that I had been giving the matter so much thought that some sort of self-hypnosis had resulted, but several years later, with no preparation of any sort, the technique worked just as well when I had several holes drilled for fillings.
On this later occasion, the dentist (a new one) said afterwards, ‘Well, do you feel pain or don’t you?’ He said that he could usually tell when he was drilling on a nerve by the salivation, but he could not in my case. This illustrates the fact that this technique, or techniques that might be developed from it, eliminates some of the physiological side effects of pain and may eliminate the shock reaction associated with severe injury or major operations.
I don't believe there has been any independent corroboration of this claim, so make of it what you will.
My model of how the human minds works predicts hypnosis (which can enable one to not experience pain as aversive or rob banks or various other things) and also the model of the mind also predicts "things not labeled as hypnosis (but which reminds people of hypnosis)"... but it often requires a certain "mental orienting" process, and I wondered if her way of orienting also works. Thanks for finding the quote! <3
It occurs to me that if you want to experiment with Celia Green's pain idea, a less extreme version than dentistry without anesthetic might be waiting until you have an itch and then seeing if you can attend to the sensation with equanimity instead of scratching it.
I believe other people who want to do simple home experiments related to pain tolerance often use ice water. You can either stick your hand in it or even immerse your whole body, if you like, and see how long you can endure it or train yourself to "accept" the pain or other mental techniques for pain tolerance. It's easy to do, and as long as you don't stay in long enough to give yourself hypothermia or frostbite, completely harmless--it may even be good for you though the jury still seems to be out on that.
Was just thinking about this again, I guess what the girl is imagining is really what you might call person-affecting-preference-satisfaction-onium; which maybe is closer to what humans will actually want for themselves post singularity.
Something along the lines of person-affecting-preference-satisfaction-onium does seem desirable.
The end of involuntary death and material scarcity seems like table stakes there, to me, AND ALSO I predict that merely that amount of transformation would be strongly resisted by most supposed "adults".
It doesn't seem like it would be bad to me if this involves atom by atom disassembly (with measurements) and then re-assembly in a simulated scape that enables more preferences to be satisfied at lower cost.
One preference I would have is "continued access to and influence over the physical world" (like via throwing my mind into robots in cool places anywhere in the real universe or into a simulated version of anything that had already been scanned and recycled) and I would presumably be able to have that?
That is what I assumed had been communicated would happen, since it sounded consistent with the children's wishes, and it seemed like all the kids shared a similar model of how wish fulfillment would go, and it didn't make sense to me that adults, if things were really collapsing, could actually coordinate to hide the secret if there was a giant secret about how it wasn't going to be "scan and join paradise" but was just going to be "die, and your atoms re-used for some silly algorithm that isn't even based on you" instead.
"Surely," I reasoned, "surely any civilization that could launch a morally oriented process to rescue the vast cold universe from the bleakness of lifelessness would also broadcast its intentions in advance and hear pleas from little pockets that have life, and then to delay in response, and not consume and digest and optimize anything that had good reasons not be optimized?"
I just assumed that Earthlings are mostly stupid, and, as a collective, we would offer BAD reasons to refuse (like the dumb fleshers in Diaspora, resisting immigration into the polises, after the stellar explosion destroyed the ecology of Earth and left them living in horror, pain, poverty, and certain extinction within a handful of months or years).
Humans are mostly very stupid, compared to how smart "agents with a generally human-shaped mind" could be... and at a certain level of moral advancement it is probably correct for a moral agent to ignore the expressed preferences of stupid people, and give them better outcomes than they can understand that they should want... A lot of people want to die, for example.
That said, I think that its a bad sign if a supposed Galaxy Eating Superintelligence can't trick a bunch of stupid humans into going along with the ASI's plans "voluntarily" via super-persuasion.
The lack of a consent process in the story seems like a bad sign? But it might simply be a sign of very very clean ethics, like when a parent forces a child to go along with something so as not to damage the child's soul, by tricking them, but just takes the hit to "the child's opinion of the parent's care in the short term" in order to get to a future state where (1) the child is physically better off and (2) the child doesn't feel brainwashed about it either and therefore (3) the child can eventually, at their own pace, as they mature, learn to agree it was the best thing to do given that the child was, in the past, younger and stupider and more foolish.
Since we only get a child's perspective, its hard to say how much it might have been "silent predatory consumption" vs "a clearly explained but non-voluntary rescue process" vs any other thing(s).
Interesting!
Yeah I think there’s some argument to be made that perhaps the ethical thing to do is actually to optimize the preferences which the superintelligence knows the agents would eventually converge on, assuming this is something that can be predicted in advance;
If it would be the case that eventually you know with high certainty that, given ideal reflection processes, people would come to the conclusion that they wish they had more rapidly been converted to some other state, and in fact actually from their reflective perspective they would greatly regret having wasted time slowly coming to that state, or risking some higher variance, less ideal decision process that might be less likely to conclude on what a more ideal process would come to, then maybe the moral thing to do is actually to violate immediate preferences in order to better fulfill well-considered preferences.
I could see a lot of people resisting this on grounds that it violates their rights or something, but I agree there’s probably pretty efficient ways around this with super-persuasion or other similar ASI capabilities if it believed following a fully consensual process was an important constraint…
That said, even if everyone knew this was going to happen and it would be fully consensual, I also agree a lot of people would still be highly panicked by the idea if they hadn’t already been persuaded; I guess in this case he would hope that the ASI would’ve sent out the super-persuasion message in advance to assuage people’s panic… I don’t know haha, I feel like we are expecting a lot from this ASI, but maybe that’s reasonable.
There's a tricky thing related to child development and non-trans-human economies. A lot of parenting/teaching philosophy is against hovering and helping too much, because there is an expectation of eventually responsible autonomy, that is bootstrapping into place. Failing to build a good tree house the first time, and then doing better on the second one... can help you learn how to build a real house later (after all the older people have died of old age and aren't around to swoop in and do it for you).
If we have immortal robo angels floating around, that can and will take care of any and all humans literally forever, maybe it is OK for humans to turn into "mere Eloi" who have never had to think or plan or have grit, and so simply lack many of higher capacities of a normal adult human mind in our era. I am proud when I can attend to duties out of my own power, and in accord with my own conscience, and it seems likely that many other humans are too. Also... having a desire to be proud this way might be something that we evolved for, because it pulls us in useful directions.
So IF YOU REJECT THE ELOI OPTION, then... there is still the question of how much to intervene, and how much to not intervene, in exactly which cases... like in terms of "pedagogy balanced against safety"?
For example, if the kid's tree house is 50 feet up, and will predictably fall down, and the kid will likely die in that fall, then the "valuable end state" of "a smarter kid who has learned how to build a tree house by trial and error" will NOT happen unless someone or something competent swoops in somehow to prevent the predictable tragedy.
Maybe to forbid the construction (if wise enough, but very poor)?
Maybe to install safety stuff fast (if wise and materially rich... but also very busy)?
Maybe to join in the process in a way that sandbags and points at things and gives clues and eventually leads to the child themself making it properly safe the first time (if the parent/angel has wisdom, wealth and free time for such things)?
If one has the resources as a parent for any of these, you could even just explain all three options to the child, and ask the child which kind of help they want... but if the child chooses option #2 over and over every time, that might be heading for a "spoiled child" who will end up as a "mere Eloi"?
In the story, one interpretation is that it is merely and simply murder (and this is being hidden from the children) but another interpretation is that option #2 is being imposed in a way that is a moral error (and maybe "adult" humans of Earth are right to be sad) and another is that option #2 is being imposed due to reasons of budgetary limits, and the humans are too narrow minded to see this.
I assumed that the latter was the case, because like... who are you going to think got things right here? An ASI? Or a bunch of dumb humans (most of whom are barely literate, barely numerate, inalgorate, haven't studied history or philosophy or economics or higher math, etc, etc, etc).
Maybe I'm also naive but I'd like the hedonium shockwave too. I think what's sad about this story is not the girl's perspective (she may be wrong about the exact reasons why she'll be happy after it hits, but she won't be upset about it when it does), but how her parents and others are so upset by it. This is a small glimpse into the universe tho, I'm sure others in-universe are happy about it.
Imo, the main downside of wireheading is that you dramatically limit your ability to spread joy/peace/bliss/good/etc, and dramatically limit your ability to reduce suffering/bad/etc. But if the entire universe is getting hit with a hedonium shockwave then that's not a proplem.
My impression from the story is not that the individual people (moms, dads, little girls, etc) will individually be converted to super-happy individuals (such as portrayed in Yudkowsky's story "Three Worlds Collide"), but rather their bodies will be torn apart (alongside the rest of the solar system) to be used for the construction of myriad tiny computers (or perhaps some biological substrate, like some kind of maximum-happiness algae) repeatedly computing some basic circuit representing maximum bliss. Or, more optimistically in my view, maybe instead of a bunch of repetitive tiny calculations, it's one big super-complex calculation of maximum bliss, like the whole world is getting eaten by a very happy god. But in either case, people's individual identities, memories, stories, etc, are going to get torn apart and destroyed. IMO this drives the central tension of the story -- the little girl is excitedly wondering what life will be like when she goes to happy-heaven, but the adults know that no existing person will have a future after 10 days from now; they are all simply going to get eaten by a happy god / happy algae / etc. The atoms in their bodies will be repurposed into something very happy, but there's no sense in which they themselves will experience the hedonium era.
I think longtermist utilitarians were making this a real concern long before AI.
(To be clear I actually find this moral view potentially plausible, although I’m pretty morally uncertain. I think it would be pretty surprising and definitely a mistake a if we intentionally don’t give current (post-)humans at least the Milky Way Galaxy, but it’s possible that it could be good to tile the rest of the universe with whatever we decide/figure out is morally optimal.)
myriad tiny computers ... repeatedly computing some basic circuit representing maximum bliss.
Surely you mean experiencing maximum bliss. That is completely different from merely "representing" it.
"Representing" maximum bliss would be like writing "I love school" 100 times on the blackboard. That does not make me actually love school...
Ah I see, good point. Well, in that world, setting aside the epistemic question of how could we know it's actually a positive valence hedonium shockwave, if I had good reason to believe it was a true hedonium shockwave I would still be overall quite happy about it. It would be much more bittersweet than my original interpretation, and now I understand much better why the adults of the story are upset, but... idk, there's so much intense suffering on earth that I'd rather have hedonium even if it means that "me" doesn't go on.
Going back to the epistemic question, I think it would be impossible to know that the shockwave is hedonium with our current understanding of consciousness. So if all I can properly know is we're all gonna get wiped out by some kind of tiling mechanism or superentity, then it goes back to being extremely sad (with the elimination of extreme suffering on earth as a silver lining, except that it could also be an antihedonium shockwave which would be far worse).
I know that's a controversial take, if it makes you feel better I don't think anyone should initiate a hedonium shockwave because it's impossible to know that it will actually work, and so Eliezers reasoning about why the ends don't justify the means applies ("for the good of the tribe don't do what's best for the tribe"). We are way too limited epistemologically (biases, blindspots, etc) to do it right, and the problem requires so much care that I don't think any mind, even a superintelligent ai or alien, would be able to overcome that issue.
It depends. We don't really get much of an actual depiction of what life in the hedonium shockwave will be like. If we take Raemon's theory that it was some aliens' paperclips, well, we can hope they designed it with Fun Theory in mind, but I don't think that's likely given the tone of the story.
Am I the only one (one of the only ones) who likes the hedonium shockwave?
Western culture loves identity and personal narratives, likely more than any species or culture in the history of the known universe, and I find it interesting how much this preference hasn't escaped the scrutiny of Lesswrong-ish folks.
I would imagine an inside view of blissful personhood transcendence would be of utmost epistemic value here. Dissolution of personal narrative is not only something that could be tolerated, but seems to be the explicit highest good of many cultures. Nature-worshipping indigenous peoples, Buddhists, contemporary psychonauts.
My inside views here, and many years of deeply studying alternatives to western humanistic egocentrism have led me to believe there is something valuable here.
So yes I like it. I also like a universe of embodied humans who have transcended just the western-conditioned suffering-inducing aspects of their personal identities, but live mostly in a state of interconnection that LinkedIn profiles, accumulations of objects riddled with a felt sense of ownership and "mine", and instagram-likes-optimizing lifestyles just aren't getting us.
I still like the piece though, the human aspect and sadness are real, I only believe they're part of a greater context.
I only believe they're part of a greater context.
Could you elaborate on what you mean by "greater context"? By my reading, the story didn't really hint at what the actual result of this "shockwave" is. The interpretation of happiness being carried out could be incredibly unfulfilling or lacking coherence.
If the "happiness" being implemented is functionally equivalent to oblivion then we don't even need to wait around for a "hedonium shockwave". We could just promote antinatalism.
Which is to say, I'm guessing you have some specific sort of "good" outcome in mind. What's your vision for the other side of this scenario?
That's true, this story did not specify what the hedonium shockwave was. I was referencing my conception based off conversations with people in this community I've had outside the context of this story, as well as the pattern of "greatest utilitarian maximization of positive valence for the universe". I would imagine, for instance, if a superpowerful AI decided to create a hedonium shockwave because they are maximizing positive valence, they would not create something unfulfilling. That seems like a pretty low-level error (and one humans do seem to make a lot)! It is interesting how your definition of happiness could be compatible with unfulfilling. This is semantics, but my semantics intuitively would say, if it's not fulfilling it's not happiness. I think the term positive valence is this best way around semantics.
I too like the hedonium shockwave, for the same reasons as you.
Some may argue I have just read too much Buddhism, but I think wellbeing and freedom from suffering is worth the loss of personal identity.
I argue they haven't read enough Buddhism 😆. I know my opinion isn't super popular here. I am willing to take the downvotes.
I have an interesting take here:
I think that perhaps preference-satisfaction-onium which the girl is imagining, and which I think is closer to what most people may actually want, may rapidly converge on hedonium, as the hedonic treadmill of preference after preference being rapidly fulfilled may lead to a ramping up of higher and higher levels of pleasure/wellbeing, without the person ever ceasing to have desire for yet even better experience, until some limit of utilitronium or hedonium is reached.
That's my take too like, exactly! People may say "I want candy" or "I want a boyfriend" but that's not really what they want. I'm going to be the most annoying person and leave this comment there, I think the rest is worth sitting with rather than me typing out.
This story shines a light on a particular stage in the transition from the regular human existance to the pure bliss after.
This stage is obviously unoptimized, since it causes humans to activate their survival instincts, which don't approve such a transition.
But, this doesn't mean the pure bliss isn't better, because humans only want to stay human because of the specific instincts in the brain that make us want to stay as we are, and also want to want that.
And this particular state of existance is very random, our wishes are specific, and our desires are shaped by our specific evolution, but they are not inherently better than any other general values (e.g. maximizing the amount of paperclips).
So this doesn't show that hedonium is inherently bad, it shows that there is a particular stage in the transition that will not feel good to the common human.
Do you get what I mean?
Stop wanting to want things, and then you'll see that the quickest way to solve our problems is to not want to solve them.
(I'm not sure I really think that way, but I am yet to find a good opposing argument, please help)
I am yet to find a good opposing argument, please help
Try the metaethics sequence, though I wish I had something shorter to give.
Woah this is an very nice follow up to "Baby eating aliens"
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/n5TqCuizyJDfAPjkr/the-baby-eating-aliens-1-8
My thinking is also much more aligned with this view
Good post. Some could suggest that hedonium in this is framed unfavourably, because in the story, living people seem to need to cease to exist for the hedonium age to commence.
I'd like to support the notion that a perfectly engineered, multi-dimensional[1] universe of hedonium[2], which does not require non-consentually shredding living people into building material, is still not a desirable future.
Before reading this story I was not familiar with the concept of the hedonium shockwave, and interpreted this story as a normal apocalyptic one in which hedonium shockwave referred to what it is, but that this was a lie told by the parents to the child when in reality it's non-hedonic grey goo or an asteroid or something of this nature. Not sure if this is useful input
Haven't we all read or seen something like this before at some point, especially within a science fiction or otherwise apocalyptic context? It certainly can't be just me. Ergo this story is a meta-story of sorts. In which case, is the point to read through its vast interconnecting cliches, which, like the scales on a fish, constitute the very body or at least form of the same? A job, qua story maker, perhaps particularly suited for LLMs these days? It's as though a person published a non-AI translation of a poem here, whose topic is both translation, plagiarism's paradoxes, mimesis, and the surrealistic artistic implications—something along late Borgesian lines—to the point that some might think the latter had inspired the architecture of current day LLMs, beyond the fact that quantitative and qualitatively better translations were being attempted per se applicable to all writerly and thus translational domains. Almost certainly they were not theoretically influenced by such fields, but, put inversely, was this incoming pseudo-causal parallelism ever mentioned in Comparative Literature or Literary Translation graduate studies classes before AI came crashing down upon our heads, if not our heavens?
I agree that "we're on a deadline for some kind [asteroid/other doomsday]" has been done. I just liked that this in fact discussed hedonium shockwaves in particular. (I don't really get the rest of your comment)
My name is Emma and I’m six and a half years old and I like pink and Pokemon and my cat River and I’m going to be swallowed by a hedonium shockwave soon, except you already know that about me because everyone else is too.
“Hedonium shockwave” means that everyone is going to be happy forever. Not just all the humans but all the animals and the flowers and the ground and River too. It has already made a bunch of the stars happy, like Betelgeuse and Alpha Centauri.
Scientists saw that the stars were blinking out, and they did a lot of very hard science and figured out that the stars were turning into happiness. I wanted to be a scientist when I grew up but I won’t be a scientist because instead I’m going to be happy forever.
I used to have a hard time saying “hedonium shockwave” but grownups keep saying it so I’ve gotten a lot of practice. Sometimes it seems like all grownups do, in real life and on the TV, is say “hedonium shockwave” at each other until they all start crying.
I looked at the sky to see if I could see any of the stars blink out when they turned into happiness, but Daddy said that you’d have to be looking at the exactly right time to see them blink out, and anyway we can’t see the stars from our house because of Light Pollution. Light Pollution is when you have lots of lights and the lights confuse the sea turtles so they walk into the streets and get run over, and also you can’t see the stars. I wanted to see the stars blink out at the planetarium but Daddy says the planetarium is closed, and even if it wasn’t closed it would be showing the regular show because grownups don’t like thinking about the hedonium shockwave.
Everything is closed these days because no one wants to work if they’re going to be happy forever in two weeks. One time we went to the store and bought all the canned food and toilet paper we could, and all the shelves were empty because everyone else was buying canned food and toilet paper too, and the store hasn’t been open since then and even if it did they wouldn’t have anything on the shelves. I asked for candy and I thought Daddy was going to say No, It Will Spoil Your Dinner but instead he said Sure, Why Not? You’re Not Going To Live Long Enough To Get Diabetes and then he bought a whole shelf of candy, all the candy I wanted and whatever kind I wanted.
We’ve been eating the canned food since then. I don’t like the canned food, so I eat candy for dinner. That’s one way the hedonium shockwave made me happy before it even got here. Except then we ran out of candy so now I have to eat refried beans. I hate them and I stick out my tongue but Mommy says I have to eat them up.
Another way the hedonium shockwave made me happy is school. School is still open even though a bunch of the kids don’t go and a bunch of the teachers don’t go either. But we don’t have to do boring things like math or phonics anymore. We have storytime three times a day, and we watch movies, and we go to recess for hours and hours.
I have to go to school because Daddy still goes to work. Daddy is a police officer which means he chases down bad guys and puts them in prison, which is time-out for grownups. Mommy says Why Are You Going To Work, Jim? (that is what Mommy calls Daddy, Jim) and Daddy says Someone Has To Make Sure The Streets Are Safe and Mommy says What Is The Point, Jim, Are They Even Going To Get A Trial and Daddy says They Can Spend Their Last Weeks In Jail, See If They Like It and then Mommy sighs and says That’s Why I Married You, Jim and they kiss and it’s slobbery and gross.
I think jail is also time-out for grownups but I’m not sure how jail and prison are different.
Sometimes at recess we talk about what it will be like when we’re all happy forever. Liam says that there won’t be any icky girls in the hedonium shockwave, because no one could be happy forever if they had to be around icky girls. I said that everyone will turn into happiness, not just the humans but all the animals and the flowers and the ground and River too, and so the girls were also going to turn into happiness, and if Liam thought that he wouldn’t be happy with girls maybe the hedonium shockwave was going to make him the sort of person who would be happy even if girls were there. Liam said that even the hedonium shockwave couldn’t make him like girls because girls were yucky and smelly. I said that actually boys are yucky and smelly and maybe there won’t be any boys after the hedonium shockwave, what then, and then I hit him in the head but no grownups saw me so I didn’t have to go to timeout.
I hate Liam. Everyone thinks I have a crush on him and they won’t stop saying it no matter how many times I hit him in the head.
When the hedonium shockwave hits I’ll get to have candy for dinner every day and we aren’t going to run out. I’m going to have the mermaid toy from the commercials whose human legs transform into fish legs, and it’ll really work, not like the time I begged and begged and got the doll that talks for Christmas and she could only say three things and none of them had anything to do with what I said.
I’ll be a princess who is also a Pokemon trainer, and I’ll be able to understand what River says just like Ash always knows what Pikachu is saying, and I’m going to travel the whole entire world and collect all the Pokemon and put them in my Pokeball which is going to be PINK. And even though I’ll be the greatest Pokemon trainer who has ever lived, River will still be my favorite because I knew her before. And I’ll dress up all my Pokemon in pretty outfits, and I’ll beat up all the bad guys and send them to jail just like Daddy does, and then we’re going to have a big ball and invite everyone in the whole world except Liam because he’s mean. And I’ll have a big closet of the floofiest dresses in the world.
I told Mommy that when the hedonium shockwave hits I’m going to have candy for dinner and a mermaid toy, and then she put her forehead against my forehead for a really long time and didn’t say anything and I tried to squirm away and she wouldn’t let me and it kind of hurt. I tried to make her happier by telling her that I was also going to be a princess Pokemon trainer and never have to talk to Liam again or anyone who says I have a crush on him which I don’t because he’s icky and he smells like turnips. She made a face like she makes when the dog dies in a movie and she wouldn’t tell me what she was sad about.
A lot of grownups are sad about being happy forever. Maybe they don’t like being Pokemon trainers.
Mommy says the hedonium shockwave hits in ten days. Daddy threw out all the calendars last month because Mommy started crying whenever she looked at them. So I got a piece of paper and I wrote 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 on it, just like we learned before we stopped learning math, and I’m going to cross one out every day unless I forget.
I’m going to cross off 10 and then I’m going to be too excited to sleep, like before Christmas when I tried to stay up to meet Santa Claus and ended up falling asleep under the dining room table with wrapping paper on my head. I’m going to look out my window and watch everything get turned into happiness, the humans and the animals and the flowers and the ground and River too. The stores will have food, and no one’s going to go to timeout grownup or regular, and Mommy will give me hugs instead of crying whenever she sees me so that my hair gets covered in snot and it’s gross.
I can’t wait.