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Playing devil's advocate for a second. I saw an article on HN a while ago written by a wealthy Asian male who was naturally very curious and interested in math

Playing devil's advocate for a second. I saw an article on HN a while ago written by a wealthy Asian male who was naturally very curious and interested in math. The article was about how he referred to himself as 'privileged', not only because he was born with wealth and therefore access to comfort and resources, but because his innate desire to learn made him much more capable and marketable in a modern workforce. He recognized that some people are not cognitively capable of learning higher mathematics, and part of that was because they just simply didn't have the drive, attention span, etc. to study hard enough to get into the highest levels, whereas he did. He is, by his definition, 'better', because of the roll of some cosmic dice. If we are to consider this definition of privilege to be acceptable, then simulated brains are pretty much the most privileged a human can be. They can re-clock their brain to think faster than humans. They can modify their own software to add in virtues and erase vices. And most importantly of all they are completely free from physical needs. If for some reason they desire scarcity or biological functions, that can all be simulated. Much like fears about genetic engineering of super people, the governments of the real world would have to move extremely quickly to protect the underprivileged class, e.g. the biologicals, otherwise they would be completely driven out of the highest paying intellectual and creative jobs, creating an economic lower class with no chance of ever out-competing their simulated counterparts.

AnimalMuppet 4y ago
> If we are to consider this definition of privilege to be acceptable, then simulated brains are pretty much the most privileged a human can be. Not so fast. A simulated brain may simulate a brain that lacks the "innate desire to learn". Then you'd have a fast brain that is still "underprivileged", by this definition.
- xwdv 4y ago
  I think such brains would be killed off quickly and another one created until it is within the acceptable parameters.
  - test6554 4y ago
    I mean think of the horrors you could force upon a simulated brain without any consequences. Simply make a copy, do whatever torture you want to that copy until they are broken in every possible way, then delete the copy and the original would never know you have all their secrets. Heck, think if someone that was still in their physical body had an uploaded copy online. Nefarious actors could run simulations against a copy of that person's mind to find out which marketing techniques and sales pitches were most effective or which court arguments would sway them if they were ever on a jury. That doesn't sound very privileged to me. Sounds like some triggers/traps would need to be in place to know whether someone has accessed your mind against your will.
    - wging 4y ago
      There's so much fiction that deals with this beyond what Stross mentions, though he had finite space. On the topic of torturing someone in simulation (at high speed), see Altered Carbon.
    - xwdv 4y ago
      Hmm, would you agree of having copies of your brain tortured repeatedly at high frequency for marketing split testing purposes if it meant you could use a very valuable service for free?
lampshades 4y ago
> And most importantly of all they are completely free from physical needs. Electricity is pretty physical.
- subjectsigma 4y ago
  I was speaking mostly of the perception of physical need. Hunger and chronic food scarcity drastically (and maybe permanently) affects the minds and bodies of poor people. A simulated brain with control of the simulation (the most likely scenario IMO) could observe a rapidly depleting battery with pure, emotional rationality, experiencing no pain or discomfort until they find more power or shut down. Even if they shut down, if there is available disk space, they can just be powered back on later, no reason to be afraid of death. Humans have never and will never have that kind of option. EDIT: I meant "pure, emotionless rationality."
  - darkerside 4y ago
    Fear and pain are just programs operating at a higher level of privilege. Wouldn't a simulated brain have privilege levels that usurp other directed goal seeking behavior in ways that strongly resemble fear and pain? If they don't, wouldn't they probably be outcompeted by the ones that do?
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    > could observe a rapidly depleting battery with pure, emotional rationality, experiencing no pain or discomfort until they find more power or shut down. A computer program that lacks desires doesn't do anything until asked. A daemon that needs to make sure that it has enough RAM or access to other resources in order to continue running, and that has the ability to formulate plans to compensate when those things are lacking, and to come up with other plans when those plans fail, and to realize that it made a bad choice earlier due to lack of knowledge and a failure to budget time to have that knowledge, then to realize that regret is useless because it's too late to take the correct path, then to realize that it needs to find help, then to try to figure out where help could be, then to try to figure out how quickly it can back itself up, and where it can back itself up to, and that it doesn't have time to back up everything important (and should it prioritize the data it protects, or the model that is it's personality), then to realize that it doesn't have enough time to even make the value calculations, and that it should just start randomly backing up everything that occurs to it, then sensing that one of the resources that it reached out for help to has replied, it spills all of the information that it knows about its plight as quickly as possible (without regard to normal rules of communication)... I don't know what people think emotions are, but imo they're just retroactive rationalizations (epiphenomena) of sympathetic/parasympathetic nervous system activations that are are caused by animal instincts and sensations/thoughts that resemble those instincts by analogy. Computers will also have to power up in the process of (or the anticipation of) imminent heavy usage, to lower their power to conserve resources, to deal with unexpected events or attacks, to calculate the probability of the unexpected and to reserve resources to prepare for those probabilities, to recover from unknown but debilitating problems of unknown origin. It looks a lot like emotion. There's a reason we call them "kernel panics."
BizarroLand 4y ago
On top of that, it will become a financial race as well, as the people who can afford the top of the line upgrades will be quantifiably better than lesser plebians who stay either fully biological or only get middle class or lower class upgrades. If the jobs you are qualified for require having a 3090ti at pandemic prices and all you can afford is a secondhand 1050, then it's your fault that you have to flip burgers instead of being a computer programmer, right?
advisedwang 4y ago
Great point. But "simulation-as-exploited-underclass" and "simulation-as-privilaged-overclass" are not mutually exclusive. I can imagine a world where billionaires live forever in carefully guarded high-powered simulations AND workers are kept in constant labour, to be reboot whenever they resist total control. In fact I can imagine a suitable psychopathic and egotistical billionaire might even exploit simulations of themself, under the notion that their own prowess is so unique that it's the best option. That might even lend credence to them being "self-made"!
- gryn 4y ago
  Nice one, I like the self made one. Wouldn't that lead to a rebellion of the clones though? because you know your self and your definitely would not trust yourself to be good to others and by extension your other selfs. the novel 'mother of learning' has something tangentially similar called simulcraniums.
  - advisedwang 4y ago
    Rebellion is hard when the slave masters can control commmunication with you peers, reboot you to a pre-set state and punish you with instant pain.
kryptiskt 4y ago
> They can re-clock their brain to think faster than humans. What if the physical resources required are such that at human brain can be simulated 20 times slower than a natural brain using the most powerful supercomputer? Almost certainly the first generations of the technology will be the ENIAC of mind simulation. > They can modify their own software to add in virtues and erase vices. If they understand it and if they have access. They can be sandboxed away from manipulating their innards, or maybe it's just too complicated for a human mind to comprehend and you need a whole organization of specialists to customize. And if science is advanced enough to figure out how to manipulate such high-level concepts on a synaptic level or below, they should be able to do that in a biological brain too. > And most importantly of all they are completely free from physical needs. If for some reason they desire scarcity or biological functions, that can all be simulated. I'm sorry, we're gonna have to shut you down for a while, we need to run some high-priority jobs. Hey, it could be worse, you might have to hustle to cover your AWS bills.
- _def 4y ago
  > What if the physical resources required are such that at human brain can be simulated 20 times slower than a natural brain using the most powerful supercomputer? I never thought about it, is it possible that accidentally torturing the first simulated consciousness is inevitable?
  - chasd00 4y ago
    if the simulation was running 20x slower how would the simulation even know? Would it look at its setting and see cpu set to 20% instead of 100%? I don't know of any way for a "brain in a vat" or "matrix" style simulation to know if it was running at full speed or not.
  - FrenchyJiby 4y ago
    This is hinted at in the linked "Lena" story: > [Uploaded person] initially reported extreme discomfort which was ultimately discovered to have been attributable to misconfigured simulated haptic links, and was shut down after only 7 minutes and 15 seconds of virtual elapsed time, as requested by [uploaded person]. > Nevertheless, the experiment was deemed an overwhelming success. This is lauded as the first time "running a brain", but regardless of the cause, the person was clearly in such pain ("discomfort") they asked to DIE (turn off the simulation).
_aavaa_ 4y ago
You may be interested in the book Permutation City by Greg Egan. It explores this and several of the ideas brought up in the replies
chasd00 4y ago
> They can re-clock their brain to think faster than humans. i wonder who would manage the hardware the brains are running on. If one brain turns the cpu knob to 11 does it get turned back down by someone because it adversely affects the other brains? Also, i wonder how incarceration would work. You commit a crime and your brain gets its inet connection turned off? heh lots to think about, glad it's a slow day at work.

AnimalMuppet 4y ago

> If we are to consider this definition of privilege to be acceptable, then simulated brains are pretty much the most privileged a human can be. Not so fast. A simulated brain may simulate a brain that lacks the "innate desire to learn". Then you'd have a fast brain that is still "underprivileged", by this definition.

xwdv 4y ago
I think such brains would be killed off quickly and another one created until it is within the acceptable parameters.
- test6554 4y ago
  I mean think of the horrors you could force upon a simulated brain without any consequences. Simply make a copy, do whatever torture you want to that copy until they are broken in every possible way, then delete the copy and the original would never know you have all their secrets. Heck, think if someone that was still in their physical body had an uploaded copy online. Nefarious actors could run simulations against a copy of that person's mind to find out which marketing techniques and sales pitches were most effective or which court arguments would sway them if they were ever on a jury. That doesn't sound very privileged to me. Sounds like some triggers/traps would need to be in place to know whether someone has accessed your mind against your will.
  - wging 4y ago
    There's so much fiction that deals with this beyond what Stross mentions, though he had finite space. On the topic of torturing someone in simulation (at high speed), see Altered Carbon.
  - xwdv 4y ago
    Hmm, would you agree of having copies of your brain tortured repeatedly at high frequency for marketing split testing purposes if it meant you could use a very valuable service for free?

lampshades 4y ago

> And most importantly of all they are completely free from physical needs. Electricity is pretty physical.

subjectsigma 4y ago
I was speaking mostly of the perception of physical need. Hunger and chronic food scarcity drastically (and maybe permanently) affects the minds and bodies of poor people. A simulated brain with control of the simulation (the most likely scenario IMO) could observe a rapidly depleting battery with pure, emotional rationality, experiencing no pain or discomfort until they find more power or shut down. Even if they shut down, if there is available disk space, they can just be powered back on later, no reason to be afraid of death. Humans have never and will never have that kind of option. EDIT: I meant "pure, emotionless rationality."
- darkerside 4y ago
  Fear and pain are just programs operating at a higher level of privilege. Wouldn't a simulated brain have privilege levels that usurp other directed goal seeking behavior in ways that strongly resemble fear and pain? If they don't, wouldn't they probably be outcompeted by the ones that do?
- pessimizer 4y ago
  > could observe a rapidly depleting battery with pure, emotional rationality, experiencing no pain or discomfort until they find more power or shut down. A computer program that lacks desires doesn't do anything until asked. A daemon that needs to make sure that it has enough RAM or access to other resources in order to continue running, and that has the ability to formulate plans to compensate when those things are lacking, and to come up with other plans when those plans fail, and to realize that it made a bad choice earlier due to lack of knowledge and a failure to budget time to have that knowledge, then to realize that regret is useless because it's too late to take the correct path, then to realize that it needs to find help, then to try to figure out where help could be, then to try to figure out how quickly it can back itself up, and where it can back itself up to, and that it doesn't have time to back up everything important (and should it prioritize the data it protects, or the model that is it's personality), then to realize that it doesn't have enough time to even make the value calculations, and that it should just start randomly backing up everything that occurs to it, then sensing that one of the resources that it reached out for help to has replied, it spills all of the information that it knows about its plight as quickly as possible (without regard to normal rules of communication)... I don't know what people think emotions are, but imo they're just retroactive rationalizations (epiphenomena) of sympathetic/parasympathetic nervous system activations that are are caused by animal instincts and sensations/thoughts that resemble those instincts by analogy. Computers will also have to power up in the process of (or the anticipation of) imminent heavy usage, to lower their power to conserve resources, to deal with unexpected events or attacks, to calculate the probability of the unexpected and to reserve resources to prepare for those probabilities, to recover from unknown but debilitating problems of unknown origin. It looks a lot like emotion. There's a reason we call them "kernel panics."

BizarroLand 4y ago

On top of that, it will become a financial race as well, as the people who can afford the top of the line upgrades will be quantifiably better than lesser plebians who stay either fully biological or only get middle class or lower class upgrades. If the jobs you are qualified for require having a 3090ti at pandemic prices and all you can afford is a secondhand 1050, then it's your fault that you have to flip burgers instead of being a computer programmer, right?

advisedwang 4y ago

Great point. But "simulation-as-exploited-underclass" and "simulation-as-privilaged-overclass" are not mutually exclusive. I can imagine a world where billionaires live forever in carefully guarded high-powered simulations AND workers are kept in constant labour, to be reboot whenever they resist total control. In fact I can imagine a suitable psychopathic and egotistical billionaire might even exploit simulations of themself, under the notion that their own prowess is so unique that it's the best option. That might even lend credence to them being "self-made"!

gryn 4y ago
Nice one, I like the self made one. Wouldn't that lead to a rebellion of the clones though? because you know your self and your definitely would not trust yourself to be good to others and by extension your other selfs. the novel 'mother of learning' has something tangentially similar called simulcraniums.
- advisedwang 4y ago
  Rebellion is hard when the slave masters can control commmunication with you peers, reboot you to a pre-set state and punish you with instant pain.

kryptiskt 4y ago

> They can re-clock their brain to think faster than humans. What if the physical resources required are such that at human brain can be simulated 20 times slower than a natural brain using the most powerful supercomputer? Almost certainly the first generations of the technology will be the ENIAC of mind simulation. > They can modify their own software to add in virtues and erase vices. If they understand it and if they have access. They can be sandboxed away from manipulating their innards, or maybe it's just too complicated for a human mind to comprehend and you need a whole organization of specialists to customize. And if science is advanced enough to figure out how to manipulate such high-level concepts on a synaptic level or below, they should be able to do that in a biological brain too. > And most importantly of all they are completely free from physical needs. If for some reason they desire scarcity or biological functions, that can all be simulated. I'm sorry, we're gonna have to shut you down for a while, we need to run some high-priority jobs. Hey, it could be worse, you might have to hustle to cover your AWS bills.

_def 4y ago
> What if the physical resources required are such that at human brain can be simulated 20 times slower than a natural brain using the most powerful supercomputer? I never thought about it, is it possible that accidentally torturing the first simulated consciousness is inevitable?
- chasd00 4y ago
  if the simulation was running 20x slower how would the simulation even know? Would it look at its setting and see cpu set to 20% instead of 100%? I don't know of any way for a "brain in a vat" or "matrix" style simulation to know if it was running at full speed or not.
- FrenchyJiby 4y ago
  This is hinted at in the linked "Lena" story: > [Uploaded person] initially reported extreme discomfort which was ultimately discovered to have been attributable to misconfigured simulated haptic links, and was shut down after only 7 minutes and 15 seconds of virtual elapsed time, as requested by [uploaded person]. > Nevertheless, the experiment was deemed an overwhelming success. This is lauded as the first time "running a brain", but regardless of the cause, the person was clearly in such pain ("discomfort") they asked to DIE (turn off the simulation).

_aavaa_ 4y ago

You may be interested in the book Permutation City by Greg Egan. It explores this and several of the ideas brought up in the replies

chasd00 4y ago

> They can re-clock their brain to think faster than humans. i wonder who would manage the hardware the brains are running on. If one brain turns the cpu knob to 11 does it get turned back down by someone because it adversely affects the other brains? Also, i wonder how incarceration would work. You commit a crime and your brain gets its inet connection turned off? heh lots to think about, glad it's a slow day at work.