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Multiheaded comments on Just another day in utopia - Less Wrong
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Comments (116)
You best be sarcastic. Waste is good! It's signaling, it's ease, it's a lack of tension, it's the life's little luxuries that you'd wish back if they were all taken from you simultaneously, without caring much about the "efficiency" of it.
I wasn't being sarcastic.
No, waste is by definition not good. Resource usage can be good, but the world of this story makes me pessimistic about how it is being done. It seems like the AI gods of this world have engineered a "post-scarcity" society with population control to keep the amount of resources extremely high per person--which enables this video game-like lifestyle for people who want it. Millions of lives could be supported with resources centrally allocated to her. That is a horribly anti-egalitarian form of communism.
Admittedly, it is possible that this takes place within a simulation, but that is never stated, and we have reason to believe that it isn't true. For example, the author mentions that Ishtar knows the AI-gods won't let her die even if she crashes, implying that this is her physical body.
Are you sure you want them to pop into existence? Why? I just can't understand! Why must there be more people? So that you can have more smiley faces? That's the road to paper-clipping!
Well, yes. Several popular versions of utilitarianism lead by a fairly short path to what's probably the first paperclipping scenario I ever read about, although it's not usually described in those terms.
Coming up with a version of utilitarianism that doesn't have those problems or an equally unintuitive complement to them is harder than it looks, though.
Why does anyone value anything? If we could painlessly pop all but 70 human beings out of existence but make the ones who remain much happier (say, 10x as happy), would you do it? Why not? Why must there be more people?
That's easy; we have to look at both cases in some detail.
-Forking over a part of our genes, mind, society and culture to create new beings with new complexity, knowing that less than optimal conditions await them, -
-versus refraining from erasing all of the extant and potential value and complexity of current beings, here and now, for a very mixed blessing (increasing the smileyness of faces while decreasing the amount of tiles). The second action has much greater utility, and is not very much like the first at all. So we could easily do the second while avoiding the first, and be consistent in our values and judgment.
Sorry, I'm a bit high.