Marshall Brain has died

But personally the “dystopia” to me feels very much like something we could end up with -it’s much more a warning. Meanwhile the fantastic nature of the utopia doesn’t really matter in contrast, because the idea of sharing society’s abundance with everyone is clearly possible.

[spoiler alert]

Everyone has a remote kill switch in their spinal cord. Once the goverment decides to be evil, any rebel will get their legs instructed to walk to a pea facility for "reeducation".

Compared to this scenario, 1984 is almost as optimistic as Equilibrium.

A utopia where everyone is starving vs a dystopia where some people are fabulously wealthy but almost everyone has basic healthcare and education and opportunity to succeed? Inequality isn't anywhere near as important as the baseline of what most people have available to them.

So yes, the fictional AI in that story would, in reality, have all kinds of edge cases and emergent properties.

But Vertebrane would also have to be Turing complete, just to be able to function.

* I jest, but not by much

The workers supply not only the drama of suffering but also a (meagre, absurd) customer base for the fast food restaurants themselves.

Last but not least, given the long distances involved in interstellar travel, an oligarch must delegate their authority, either to a machine, a human, or a combination, and that is an opportunity for some drama as experience and vision inevitably diverge. This would be true even if, for example, the delegate is a perfect clone of the oligarch. It would be within these cracks and crevices hope could form, only to be crushed, in artistic, brutal fashion.

If nothing else, it's a way of demonstrating status - "sure, I could have an AI do it more cheaply, but instead I have an actual sentient being doing my bidding, because I can."

To give a parallel that I think is reasonably illustrative, it would not at all surprise me if in the future everybody else uses fully automated self driving vehicles, but the truly rich still hire chauffeurs.

Past a certain point of wealth, "because it would be cheaper" becomes a socially enforced reason to *not* do something.

What does indicate that the claim "God answers prayers" is false, is the near total lack of personal responses to those praying*, not even so much as "your prayer is important to us, you are number 184,693,224 in the queue" that I'm sure is an SMBC comic but cannot find easily on Google right now — if I had even once had such a clear and obvious statement ringing in my ears when I went through a Catholic school, I wouldn't have switched to Wicca before giving up on religion entirely.

(Not that Wicca gave me direct answers to prayers, just that it never claimed it would, either — Doreen Valiente and Janet & Stewart Farrar were both very clear about having made up the rituals themselves).

* Almost all such people, at least. Just as the number of people who claim to be able to physically shape-shift into werewolves is very small but not zero (guess how to join the dots between me knowing this and having had an interest in Wicca), the number is small enough that… other… causes are more plausible than the divine.

A leg amputated is a leg lost and the journey of a test and struggle that begins next. That’s an answer. Not a lie.

Once again, the writer doesn’t understand God, prayer, religion, and the purpose of man. And he cannot make sense out of this paradigm. So he falls further into misguidance, like a schoolboy who misses the primary instructions only to reject the class entirely.

Consciousness is simply an emergent property of that complexity.

god doesn't make my brain work, biochemistry does, and imbibing certain chemicals impacts that in obvious ways, e.g. alcohol, lithium, or diazepam

just because I cannot see or understand my unconsciousness does not mean it isn't just another chemical process, in the same way that I do not have conscious control of how my body produces white blood cells or bile.

And there are various religious traditions that claim various holy texts as being the direct product of a deity.

Most, but not all, of these claims are, theologically, untestable.

Here's an analogy: Would you find a guy walking down the street, ask him to take part in your science experiment measuring how high guys can jump, hear him say "no I don't want to take part", then conclude that because he did not jump for you he is unable to jump? You wouldn't. In fact, you might get disciplined by your university's ethics review board for experimentation without consent. In the same way, for most tests, the Bible says that God does not want to be tested. You should assume that your unwilling test subject will not cooperate, or even work to frustrate, your tests.

The talk about observations over longer times can seem persuasive. I think an analog would be hiring a PI to tail the unwilling guy test subject for years. But if you don't see him jump in 5 years, does that mean he can't? What more if he knows you're following him and that you want to see him jump, is years of not jumping valid evidence then? That's not evidence at all, much less overwhelming evidence.

One challenge I've found in navigating this is determining the extent to which (interpretation from an untrained but intelligent layperson) == (interpretation from someone with a lot more historical, linguistic, and theological training).

I.e., how much research is needed before one can reasonably conclude that the "promise" being evaluated isn't just a straw man.

> As a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival, in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren? And if that's the exchange, I'm all in.

The chief science advisor of the UK described his meetings with the PM of the UK in 2020:

> “He says his party ‘thinks the whole thing is pathetic and Covid is just nature’s way of dealing with old people – and I am not entirely sure I disagree with them. A lot of moderate people think it is a bit too much.’”

> Vallance’s diary also recounts how then chief whip Mark Spencer told a cabinet meeting in December 2020 that “we should let the old people get it and protect others”. He said that Johnson then added: “A lot of my backbenchers think that and I must say I agree with them”.

I didn't use a direct timecode link because 1.) it's not really all in one place, and 2.) I feel the entire interview is almost a microcosm of his thought. But if you insist...

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@12:20: (on climate change) "We know we have to do something, but how do you get an entire planet of people to decide on a direction and start doing it together? We have terrible examples of it, like WWII, where the entire planet marched to destroy each-other. It was horrible! Think how much time and effort and people and materials got spun up for WWII. If we can do that for climate change, climate change would be done! It would be well on its way to being better than it is now, where we're just on a path to doom essentially."

@14:30 (asked about Manna) "We would have hoped that we would have somehow gotten enlightened -- I don't want to go political here, but -- you gotta look back on the past five years and just wonder, 'what the heck happened?' The dystopian side of it seems right on target, right on track for... something. Because people are just getting poorer and poorer in the United States. The body politic is just getting crushed, and you would like there to be a better way. I don't have a great..."

@16:50: (on privacy in a Manna-like world) "The problem with privacy is that you end up with a whole bunch of people storming the Capitol of the United States, and you have to do this enormous amount of work to figure out who they were, and some of them you don't even know now. I don't think they caught even half the people, and very few of the people at the upper echelons, it's undetermined, but it's likely they're all gonna escape. Because they're able to do stuff, they're able to hide -- right now we're seeing all this stuff about people erasing their text messages in the Secret Service, and now in the Department of Defense, and now you get what happen on the internet where these anonymous trolls are just coming out of nowhere and saying whatever they want even if it's not true, and you get bots on -- I don't know what the percentage is, but let's say half of Twitter is not even people. All of that gets eliminated if it's all non-anonymous."

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(and now, we get to the parts I was thinking about in my original post)

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@24:18: "The blessing and the curse of that [Doomsday] book is that it's so depressing. Imagine writing it! ... It still effects me today.

Having gone that deep on that many topics is hard. But what I'm doing now is writing about climate change. That's just a little part of the doomsday book. And it's so hard, because we're looking at an apocalypse possibility here if we don't change. How do you get all of humanity to change -- you mention the profit motive -- in the context of giant corporations who don't want to change, and have 1,000 reasons not to? Climate change is a hard thing."

@28:14 "this week, there is so much bad news on the climate front, it is really... if you're paying attention it is really hard to see how bad off we are."

@30:00 (on causes for optimism) "[long pause] Well if you're in the United States, Kansas voted yesterday... to protect abortion in Kansas. And if you look at all the states around Kansas, they're all now locking down. So if you're in favor of abortion being a right that women have in their reproductive space, then that was a tiny bit of good news. A fundamental right was taken away from women by the Supreme Court, and that was a tiny victory. It showed that you could get people out to think about things in a rational way. I found that vote yesterday uplifting.

If I sat here long enough I could probably think of some others, but that's the first thing that comes to mind. There's just so much awful stuff!!"

@32:05: "I have four children who are all in college. And I teach in a university, I have 100 students a semester. I know them, I interview all my students. It is hard to grow up in a society with this much stuff roiling around.

This absolutely was not part of my college experience. The future looked bright! There was even a song about how bright the future looked.

College now and college then are on different planets. There's so much stuff our 20 year olds are thinking about. You just rattled off a list: from the economy, to jobs, to the climate, to fundamental rights, to will we even have a democracy in America in two years?

And you either embrace it -- I got my both arms wrapped around it trying to see the whole picture! -- or you just turn off. You know, don't watch the news."

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Sad to see the darkness take such a bright light.

In his honor, we should all strive to hold something of Marshall Brain's optimism in ourselves. Thanks for reading.

I would never begrudge someone with a terminal degenerative illness choosing the manner of their exit.

And there are states of mind which, had you ever experienced them, would have you pleading for a swift end to things. You are lucky to have never known them.

Good and evil don't necessarily come into it at all, except for in a judgmental observer's mind. Some people call abortions evil (even if they're terminal, or a result of rape, etc). Yet they feel different when it's their abortion.

Many people felt gay marriage was so evil that it would end society as we know it. Same with cannabis; same with left handedness.

Sometimes suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem; sometimes it's a mercy. What qualifies you to judge someone else's decision and label them evil, without so much as having met them?