LESSWRONG
LW

All of Kevin7's Comments + Replies

The Thing That I Protect
Kevin720

This post needs more explosions.

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War and/or Peace (2/8)
Kevin700

And is Fate/Stay night really that good?

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2Articulator
Eliezer may think so, but I have feeling that this is at least partially foreshadowing a disconnect between these future humans' values and our own.
War and/or Peace (2/8)
Kevin710

This story is so Asimovian that I keep waiting for "violence is the last refuge of the incompetent" to pop up.

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War and/or Peace (2/8)
Kevin710

Manon: I hesitate to post this because it's such an emotional piece, but Eliezer has already written an impassioned response to your question. http://yudkowsky.net/other/yehuda

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The Baby-Eating Aliens (1/8)
Kevin7-10

Is this a different story from the one that was supposed to make us go insane?

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Eutopia is Scary
Kevin727-2

You can publish it; I promise we'll be fine.

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Serious Stories
Kevin770

Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is a pretty good utopia. Also, I would happily live in the extreme post-singularity of complete AI control off all matter and energy from The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect.

Doctorow's Utopia has few drawbacks that don't exist in modern society, and Metamorphosis is an issue of what friendly AI means. Eliezer, you'd probably like Metamorphosis if you haven't read it -- it's about an obscenely strong AI programmed to follow Asimov's three laws. It touches on a number of issues that you write about here, lik... (read more)

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5Hul-Gil
I enjoyed Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom quite a bit! I'm glad Kevin7 posted this link. However, the insanity portrayed as being beneficial and desirable in The Metamorphosis is too egregious to ignore - even if the rest of the story had made good on its promise of providing an interesting look at a posthuman world. (It doesn't. We don't even get to see anything of it.) At first, I thought "oh, great; more cached-thought SF"... but it was worse than that. I forced myself to finish it just so I could be sure the following is accurate. Worse than the already-irritating "death gives meaning to life!" reasoning replete in the work, we find either actual insanity or just a blithe disregard for self-contradiction: * Technology is bad, because one day the universe will die. (What's the connection? No fucking clue.) * We should live like cavemen, because technology (and knowledge itself - no reading!) will lead to murder (but certain arbitrary tools are okay); but death is fine when it's a bear or disease that kills you. * Reality isn't "really real" if it's created or controlled by an AI, even if it's indistinguishable from... uh... other reality. * And, of course, we save the most obvious conclusion for last (sorta-spoiler warning): despite item #2, it's okay to murder billions of happy immortals because you're unhappy that life is safe and everyone is free at last. Merits as a story? Well, at first, it's even a little exciting, as we are treated to a glimpse of a post-Singularity world (the only glimpse we get, as it turns out), and then some backstory on how the AI was created. That's cool; but after that, it's not worth reading, in this reader's humble opinion. It's very formulaic, the characters (all ~three of them) have no personality (unless you count angst), and any technical or imaginative details that might be interesting are... well, either not there at all, or waved away with the magic Correlation Effect Plot Device. (It's first used to explain one t