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There is something that makes me deeply uncomfortable about how casual he is about making a killing machine, and how there is no acknowledgment that it's a horrible invention. There is seemingly no forethought or justification, he saw it in an anime and made it then brushes it off as art in one line at the end.

It's not technologically challenging nor does it have beautiful craftsmanship, like some homemade guns. I really don't get it.

It reminds me of the suicide helmet, made of iron surrounded by shotgun shells. But that was something chilling and impressive both in intent and form.

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This is "A Modest Proposal" style satire.

I considered it but, as others have commented, the author works in Defense. You don't usually satirize a system or culture you're actively and willingly building.

You usually don't, but the system doesn't care either way. The system packages up critique and commodifies it into benign impotence regardless.

Yeah, this is as low-brow as joking about war horrors. This has potential to be truly horrific. Imagine political and war prisoners and their entire families being strapped to this thing and then enslaved for their entire lives on the threat of having their brains blown to bits at any second. Surely this is worse than any form of torture imaginable and worse than death. It's difficult to see the funny part.

Luckey's suicide device is indeed disturbing, but this scenario is just outlandish sci-fi. Why jump through all the technical hoops when you can pay a goon to pull a trigger? Historically, this has already happened a million times.

You don't have to pay the goon if he wears that.

It's not about the death it's about the slavery.

Yoking a human brain to perform tasks that only a human can get right, but not having to pay them, a basically get to use them like software.

About the only thing keeping this from becoming a reality is it probably costs more in labor to maintain the bodies than to just have desperate people perform the same tasks for extremely low pay.

Then again, Palmmer's current company builds automated weapons. Imagine a missile guided by an on-board human. Not remote, on-board. The Japanese did manage to employ Kamikaze's but generally it would be pretty hard to source a supply of willing and trained volunteers for that. But you could stick someone in this, run them through training games more or less perpetually, until one day it's not a game and the victim simply does their usual job unaware they are a human bullet this time.

Still probably impractical because of the life support, but maybe not. You don't need any more life support than an ordinary jet fighter for a short one-way trip, and what was impractical yesterday is no longer impractical tomorrow.

It should be thought about, because it can actually be done roght now, which means someone somewhere will do it, or already has.

Imprisonment and forced labor already exist. Remote control weapons already exist. Nobody is wearing explosive collars.

You should think about solving these problems in the real world, not a fantasy cyberpunk dystopia.

> Nobody is wearing explosive collars.

They've been used repeatedly in real life. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Brian_Douglas_Wells is probably the most famous example, but they've been used even more recently by ISIS

Consciousness in a box used as an appliance is no worse than ordinary slavery eh? Moron.

> You don't usually satirize a system or culture you're actively and willingly building.

I feel like that's the most common time for you to satire a culture. You know all the intimate details.

I absolutely would. This is Andy Kaufman level comedy, which isn't to everyone's tastes, but does get under one's skin.

In this particular case, it's specifically designed to make you VERY uncomfortable, to show what could be if we're not vigilant. Pushing it in peoples faces makes it into a kind of inoculation, hopefully preventing it from actually happening.

As for the industry the author is in, this kind of product wouldn't even fit into a defense company's line. Defense companies produce products to neutralize an enemy, something for which an exploding headset would fall laughably short (maybe as a James Bond style assassination device?). A product like this would be more in line with a police/prison equipment supplier (for coercing people already under your physical control).

yeah this is performance art/trolling. It clearly seeks a reaction, which is amplified by the casual description.

If it was anyone but Palmer, my assumption would be that it is satire. However, since it is Palmer, my assumption is that he did actually build enough of it for it to be lethal if fully armed, and that it is genuinely a tribute to SAO rather than a warning about VR.

You’re wrong. When you work in defense or are a soldier, you make jokes about the system you’re in. When you’re in any field you make dark jokes about the field you’re in. I’ve done it, I’ve seen it, from time to time something goes too far if viewed from the outside.

I’ve seen it essentially everywhere, including working in defense briefly. A dark sense of humor reflects actually thinking about the the more complex aspects of the work you do.

A Modest Proposal was satirizing how the English treated the Irish.

What’s being satirized here? The whole write up is basically a love letter to Sword Art Online.

If I made a game that shocked the players like in Never Say Never Again (which I have thought about doing multiple times since I was a kid), it wouldn’t be a satire. It would just be a thing.

Satire has a message. It has a target. What’s the target here?

It's really not. "A Modest Proposal" was a criticism of people and society. It was so ridiculous you'd have to sympathize with the point he's making or be devoid of morals. What's the point the author is making? It's just a morbid fixation that he says he got from video games.

Pretty sure this is not how satire is written. Was looking for an ice breaker throughout the blog which never came. Then I realised he is casually talking about killing people in real life as if its a video game

"The good news is that we are halfway to making a true NerveGear The bad news is that so far, I have only figured out the half that kills you."

Clearly satirical

For context, the whole anime touches on this part, and how to see the inventor of the machine.

To spoil a bit, it’s a mixed bag and he isn’t the horrible villain you’d expect. Arguably the main characters have a lot of sympathy for what he created and half forgive his atrocities.

To dig a bit more, I think this ambiguity resonated with many people who would give up their current life if they could live a new (hopefully better) one in a different world (they keyword being “isekai”). Most of the isekai genre is super fluffy fantasy, and SAO sits at the border of somewhat plausible if science could advance at a crazy pace.

For many, even living in a world with well defined rules and somewhat of a fair (albeit deadly) meritocracy would be a lot more bearable than their current situation. I don’t expect Palmer to be in that boat, but he also seems to be more on the tech bro side, so who knows ?

You are right to be uncomfortable, I am too, and it’s I think a pretty important aspect of how some people view the world in this day and age.

Palmer Luckey's latest company is a defense contractor. Comparatively, this is performance art.

Not only your regular kind of defense contractor, of all things, Anduril is in the business of automated weaponry.

I should apply for a job there, sounds kind of awesome. I used to work for Lockheed and didn't do cool stuff.

Thank god the sort of people who mindlessly seek “cool” stuff to work on in the absence of any kind of ethics seldom have the intelligence, skill, or charm to realize any of their dreams.

It is far more ethical than ostensible moral superiority and thin ethical postering by SV crowd, Palmer addresses it quite well here: https://youtu.be/nK0NfL2M5L4?t=820 and here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q95LjvFdoAQ

Is it better to addict children to gambling in mobile apps, or to build hopefully unused tools to defend those same children from invading rapists and murderers should the need ever arise?

Ukraine wouldn't exist if not for modern weapons systems.

If you love your peaceful life, you have war machines to thank.

America is secure, as is Western Europe, due mostly to terrifying war machines.

Keeping us all safe and at peace is something some might regard as truly noble.

I don't build weapons systems, but I would if I had the opportunity. It'd beat the shit out of predatory adtech and addicting kids to algorithms.

Moral questions aside, inertial navigation and guidance, fuze design, radar, multispectral optics etc are wildly more interesting problems to solve than "how do I hook whales for $700 in this shitty iOS game?"

Maybe we'll see an influx of new minds in defense now that Facebook and friends seem to be falling apart and firing everyone.

Maybe it'll make us all safer, happier, and richer (because war destroys wealth, and weapons can avert it entirely).

So what is it with right leaning tech guys in defense going for LOTR?

Palantir, Anduril. Does PL work in Thiel’s orbit, maybe connected at FB?

Was Tolkien right leaning himself, I would be surprised by that but I honestly don’t know.

> Was Tolkien right leaning himself, I would be surprised by that but I honestly don’t know.

Yes, but the small-c conservative Catholic sort of right-wing. He would have hated reactionary modernists like Thiel.

Indeed, but from the other way around. Tolkien hates industrialization, he hates technology as a whole. He hates GRRM-esque "Does Aragorn have a tax policy that make sense?".

So he would hate Thiel and Luckey for their technology and control, who is like Sauron and the Orcs. Maybe more on Luckey, since Virtual Reality would be a horror show from a traditionalist mind, anyway.

But it's fine, since the entire point of the Sagas for Anglo culture is for the people in it to twist it the way they want to, after all.

I also found it weird how he talks about "the SAO incident", in which thousands of people were affected as though it was real.

How do you feel about this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euthanasia_Coaster

Reading it again I feel like this is most likely satire. It just feels so contradictory to the entirety of the author's background, it's odd.

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