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Comment by imbnwa | Hacker News Reader

If extraterrestrial aliens have the tech to travel vast distances across space, they have the automation to do the majority of physical labor and to build the automation. I liked Colony's human stories (even the typical annoyingly rebellious teenage boy trope was good cause he got himself emotionally manipulated on multiple occasions thinking he was finding his own virtue) but the premise was from the 1950s.

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I thought this was partially explained because the AI aliens were advanced but extremely limited in number i.e. there were only a few hundred left. so they need humans and human resources to make up for their limitations in numbers.

That they're AI-based aliens kinda obviated things even more, from where I'm standing they should definitely have figured out automation and automation factories and only needed resources as input. Digital consciousness with no factory automation? Not a smart move. Skynet and the AIs of The Matrix and Horizon: Zero Dawn all got that right.

The factory was used as a punishment detail, not just for manufacturing. Plus if the aliens are a race of AI constructs, maybe they consider using organic beings to be a form of automation!

Organic beings with diverse genetic and epigenetic history can be a mechanism for automated software development, i.e. AI training data.

Eh, maybe. But we see that the AIs in more forward-thinking franchises like The Matrix, The Terminator, or the video game Horizon: Zero Dawn all figured out factory automation from the jump.

Not to mention, as we know in our very terrestrial societies, human labor is very inefficient in more ways than one, though more creative for that.

That didn't stop the AI in the matrix from using humanity as an energy source!

there is also the problem that it's already been proven via game theory/prisoner's dilemma that when future contact is expected, cooperation is the only valid solution

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evolution_of_Cooperation

Only in a closed system.

You mean the only valid rational decision?

Because humans are not purely rational.

That's putting it mildly... How many Americans have refused COVID vaccination and died because it it?

WHO[1] had the first contact with The Hosts 1 year, 11 months, 1 week and 6 days ago.

The GTA member states[2] unanimously voted to surrender to The Hosts.

During the first meeting the members decided against "Total Rendition" of the planet, and opted for the more humane methods instead.

All known members of the organization are human and it can be assumed that they derive authority from and work on behalf of The Hosts but the ultimate leader or decision maker is unknown.

[1] World Hosts Order (WHO) a.k.a. Global Transitional Authority (GTA), Headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, it has six regional proxy offices and 150 proxy offices in colonies worldwide.

[2] Member nations of the Global Transitional Authority are the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Switzerland, China, Argentina and the United Arab Emirates.

This begs the question: what happened to Russia?

Gregory (Scotland Yard): "Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?"
Sherlock Holmes: "To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time."
Gregory: "The dog did nothing in the night-time."

Sherlock Holmes: "That was the curious incident."

– "Silver Blaze" by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1892)

The theory underlying the Prisoner's Dilemma (and game theory, generally) are really important, but they aren't sufficient to explain human behavior. The kind of rational analysis you're talking about makes some pretty big assumption about human beings that aren't universally true, in practice.

Probably the biggest departure is that humans have a tremendous mental capacity to believe in a story that is more emotionally convenient, even when it directly contradicts a reality that is evidence-based but emotionally-upleasant.

People have repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to craft massive lies, and the uy into massive lies, even when it directly leads to the unnecessary deaths of millions of people... I'm not even talking about COVID here, I was actually thinking more about the behavior of Japanese civilians in Okinawa and Japan during the closing months of WWII.

For whatever reason, humans have evolved an ability to operate for extended periods in a state of denial of reality. I presume it's not an accident, and that our ability to defy reality has some useful function that has been selected for, over time, by evolution.

But there's absolutely nothing in our behavior, at either an individual level or on a whole- society level, that compels us to behave in an analytically rational way.

The denial of reality may be something, (clearly in the trivial cases, denial of facts, it is a common fault) - but more interesting is to ask the converse question: just what exactly does it mean to "accept" reality? As if there was a given relatively unique inevitable response, such as reason could articulate? (in other words, beyond basic common sense, there is really no "rational" way to accept reality at all.)

If we can't agree on some functional common ground for what it means to "accept reality", then I think our discussion is finished. Good luck, I hope it works out for you.

I think we can agree on common ground, I just don't think it's what really matters. Actually, I'd say what matters most, is that we disagree. What would actually happen if everything was simply true?

You might like Slavoj Zizek's take on ideology

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