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Comment by wruza | Hacker News Reader

But imagine having much better memories than you have now. It is much better to wake up and go to work knowing that you spent a good vacation last three month, than having boring eternal life of a regular worker with low wage. Forget that your SO cheated on you. Believe that all people are good.

If you’d sell memory tampering devices, are you sure that most of them would be used against someone other instead of on buyers themselves?

What if we had special devices that could sneakily push preferences or suggestions to unaware person? It would be a very dangerous tech! (Oh, nevermind, I use one of them to write this comment)

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imagine starting every day of your working life thinking you just got done with a wonderful two weeks vacation, energized and ready to continue on with your employment tasks! in fact with our new happy memory management service your employees will never need to take a vacation, weekend, or fake sick day again - because they will think they just did!

"For the memory of a lifetime, Recall, Recall, Recall"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYRVMeAwVKk

"Don't fuck with your brain pal!"

Plot twist: you're actually a moderator for Facebook looking at child porn and beheadings all day. Further plot twist: that FB gig was another fake memory to cover up your involvement in a secret government project involving lots of enhanced interrogation, to provide plausible cause for the psychological damage that wasn't entirely fixed by memory replacement.

Remind me of Robin Hanson's Age of Em. Ems are human minds copied into computers and executable there. Being easy to copy, you can spin up as many Elon Musks as you need. And if you have the brain state stored, every day you can have those Elons on the best, most work ready, focused day of their lives. All digitally, of course.

I got an idea, let's have some of these Elon Musks handle our media communications today - what could go wrong?

It is exactly what I meant. Unless you’re meaningless truth seeker, that life is a charm to live. People will do it to themselves, no need for special memory service guys. If you dig deep enough on what happiness, energy and fresh feelings are (against reality), there will be a plast of blurred lines very soon. Even health issues have many roots in your mental state. It is basically side-effect free, natural heroin.

Ed: oops, removed e from heroin

People already self-medicate themselves with alcohol and other drugs. Altering memories will just be one more thing on this list.

Since we are on a metaphorical treadmill where the vast majority of our wages are used on rivalrous goods like real estate or education the end result will be that people will work harder then alter their memories to continue beyond their breaking point. A 20 hour workday is no big deal because the company provides you with free memory alteration at the end of the work day. It doesn't matter that you slept at the office because you remember being at your nice single family home in the suburbs and sleeping for 8 hours.

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