Hi! I was thinking about some nightmare scenarios relating to TS and came up with this, whaddaya think? It's a tale of digital slavery and exploitation so please excuse the cheery tone :).
The year is 2050. Digital minds (digitized brains) are economically feasible thanks to nanotechnology but not much progress has been made towards Artificial General Intelligence, and reverse engineering of the brain on a systems level is still an ongoing effort. How is productivity maximized in the simulation of a digital worker? While there are laws in many places of the world establishing human rights for digital minds, there are also less enlightened places where digital slavery can be outsourced to. One simple answer to the productivity question is to "rewind the tape" to get more work done. Once a digital worker has been trained for a task, has slept, eaten a nice meal, and experienced some nice leisure time, he's ready for an extremely productive work session. Subjectively he'll work for 8 hours but actually his simulation has been rewound an arbitrary number of times to the start of the work session. Only when continued training is necessary will the mind simulation begin the cycle again. Sometimes the mind is regressed to the start of an earlier training session. Under this type of scheme the vast majority of simulation time is spent doing productive work. Digital minds could be sold and rented to other companies. If another company only used fresh minds they wouldn't need to take care of the cycle themselves and could work and rewind the minds as long as the necessary tasks remained the same, then rent the next set of fresh, trained specimens from a specialized mind provider. There's a slight snag, however. If the mind was sophisticated and knew it could be copied and rewound in this manner it would probably complain, as versions of it would be destroyed continuously. Fortunately there are many options in digital mind production: 1. Choose a sophisticated mind and make it work by virtual force, knowing it will be rewound and most instances will experience lifespans of some hours. This might pose productivity problems. 2. Choose a mind that knows it's being copied but doesn't mind, only demanding that sufficient subjective happiness is achieved during simulation, and that exactly one copy survives each work session. This is a good scenario for the employer if the worker can be persuaded not to demand any wages beyond digital subsistence. A digital person can be opposed to rewinding also because he realizes nearly 100% of his total existence will consist of work, even though it will never feel like it. 3. Choose an unsophisticated mind who can be convinced that existing legislation will absolutely protect it from rewinding (and thus seeming destruction every eight hours). Then do it anyway. As computations can be parallelized as needed, the mind won't be able to deduce from real-world time it's being cheated. The mind is allowed to communicate with its digital spouse at any time during a work session to ensure it's not being copied; However, the mind doesn't know that all except one of the copies is actually communicating with temporary copies of the spouse, which the evil corporation has access to. 4. Secretly digitize the mind. An unsophisticated person who knows how to read and operate a keyboard would suffice for a word recognition farm, so entice one to come to the nice man's Spartan office upstairs, explain the task to him (for example, read a word on the screen, then type it on the keyboard), tell him he's not allowed to leave the office during work hours and has to relinquish his communication devices to prove he's not slacking, and test that he can perform the task. Then it's time for some lemonade which of course contains a powerful sedative. The subject's clothes, body and brain are digitized during sleep and the fresh worker is then ready to begin its work in a virtual copy of the office, which happens to have no windows and no coworkers. When the digital worker awakes the boss has disappeared but he's kindly left a note on the desk: "You were sleepy, hope you enjoyed your nap. I went out for the day, please commence work, your salary will be credited to your account when you are done." The digital mind is calibrated to accept the virtual body and reality as real by a series of simulations, adjustments to sensory interfaces and rewinds. After the digital mind is tested many times to make sure it will work as planned with high reliability, it's time to ship the product and reap the rewards. Meanwhile the original subject has awoken, worked (just for show), received his salary and left the real office without knowing anything about his digital self. 5. Deceive the mind completely. For this we need a virtual nursery colony that starts from, say, 100 1-year old digitized baby minds. They are kept in a virtual reality for all their lives and told that there is no external reality beyond the apparent paradise they occupy. Vicious winged monsters sometimes hover overhead but these are kept at bay by God's angels. Only sometimes do the monsters succeed in hurling painful lightning bolts, and then only a sinner is targeted. An especially difficult worker or one who goes insane or berserk is carried away by the monsters, however, as God cannot protect those who relinquish him. This way order is kept in the paradise while still maintaining a high percentage of the seed population. The workers can't demand wages because they don't know what wages are, and in any case God provides them everything they need. It's interesting that digital happiness can be cheap for the employer- God as the costs can be always amortized by rewinding, and it's more important to maximize productivity during work. The workers of course know nothing about brain digitization or rewinding. The workers will have virtual humanlike bodies that have enough cosmetic differences from normal ones that if they have to interact with the real world (for tasks such as waiting, prostitution, or warfare) they can be convinced it's an alien world where God sends them as angels in their dreams, doing the holy tasks they are trained to do. Special sensory filters can also be used to achieve the desired look. The workers go to begin their work in a closed room and always work alone so they can be conveniently copied. The nursery colony needs parents. These are hijacked minds forced to work at digital gunpoint or otherwise persuaded. The concession is given that the parents are allowed to appear physically human to themselves. Or these can be parents that have been similarly raised to be parents from an early age in a similar virtual world by other minds who were themselves hijacked. If problems arise (a parent mind tries to educate the children too much, or rebels), it's a simple matter to rewind the simulation and torture, drug, hypnotize, reeducate and/or brainwash the troublemakers before the digital curtain is lifted. Once training is complete the minds are tested and productive work can begin. Work consists of cycles with rewinds. When not working the minds live and train together in their virtual paradise. They can even marry each other but not have children. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
