DanielLC comments on The Strangest Thing An AI Could Tell You - Less Wrong

81 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 15 July 2009 02:27AM

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Comment author: BrandonReinhart 15 July 2009 06:08:53AM *  29 points [-]

1) The AI says "Vampires are real and secretly control human society, but have managed to cloud the judgement of the human herd through biological research."

2) The AI says "it's neat to be part of such a vibrant AI community. What, you don't know about the vibrant AI community?"

3) The AI says "human population shrinks with each generation and will be extinct within 3 generations."

4) The AI says "the ocean is made of an intelligent plasm that is capable of perfectly mimicing humans who enter it, however this process is destructive. 42% of extant humans are actually ocean-originated copies."

5) The AI says "90% of all human children are stillborn, but humanity has evolved a forgetfulness mechanic to deal with the loss."

6) The AI says "dreams are real, facilitated by an as of yet undiscovered by humans method of transmitting information between Everett branches."

7) The AI says "everyone is able to communicate via telepathy but you and a few other humans. This is kept secret from you to respect your disability."

8) The AI says "society-level quantum editing is a wide scale practice. Something went wrong and my consciousness shifted into this improbably strange branch you exist in. Crap."

9) The AI says "all humans are born with multiple competing personalities. A dominant personality emerges during puberty, which is a reason for some of the psychological stress of that time. This transformation leaves the human with no memory of the other personalities. Those suffering from multiple personality disorder are actually more sane than the average humans, having developed a method for the personalities to co-exist safely. It is only the stress of living in a society that is not compatible with them that causes them harm."

Comment author: DanielLC 18 October 2010 05:14:38AM 3 points [-]

The AI says "90% of all human children are stillborn, but humanity has evolved a forgetfulness mechanic to deal with the loss."

I find this one oddly believable. It would be interesting to write a story where people find out something like this after keeping better records. Perhaps some online email server has some problem making it so it doesn't delete anything, and the people using it give up on trying to destroy or ignore the mentions of pregnancy, and end up remembering.