7 ms·
Lena (2021)
- nkurz 3y agoI'm sorry if I'm missing something obvious, but why is the story titled "Lena"? Not the HN title---I realize that matches the linked article. My question is why 'qntm' decided to give the story that title, while using "mmacevedo" for the URL. From what I can tell, "Lena" doesn't appear anywhere else in the story. My best guess is that it's a reference to the scanned Playboy image that was used as a standard in early image processing work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna. But if this is true, I'm surprised it isn't mentioned in the article where the article discusses the meaning of the story: https://qntm.org/uploading https://qntm.org/uploading. Is there a better answer?
- jkingsman 3y agoThis, along with "It Looks Like You’re Trying To Take Over The World"[0] are two of my favorite short pieces of speculative fiction that embody the Frederik Pohl quote, "a good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam." This story, a sequel, and other great short stories are collected in his book of ten short stories "Valuable Humans in Transit".[1] I'm a big fan of supporting indie scifi offered with DRM-free ebooks! [I am not affiliated with qntm despite my enthusiasm] [0]: It Looks Like You’re Trying To Take Over The World: https://gwern.net/fiction/clippy https://gwern.net/fiction/clippy [1]: Valuable Humans in Transit: https://qntm.org/vhitaos https://qntm.org/vhitaos
- marcellus23 3y agoI didn't realize this was the same person who wrote Fine Structure! That book is amazing. Definitely going to pick up their other books now.
- jkingsman 3y agoOoh I haven't read that one. Next on the list!
- LeifCarrotson 3y agoI'm a big fan of Ra, the hardcover is on the top of my bookshelf right now!
- mhink 3y agoSo, I wasn't that big a fan of the Clippy story (probably not the target reader here) but the QNTM one was *fantastic*.
- aloe_falsa 3y agoFunnily enough, "MMAcevedo" doesn't break my suspension of disbelief, while "Clippy" does, hard - even though it tries to stay grounded in reality and drown you in quotes and references.
- nmeofthestate 3y agoWhat happened at the end of It Looks Like etc, after it's killed all humans, and it launches the ICBMs? Does it decide to kill itself for some reason? Couldn't decipher that.
- Philpax 3y agoIt’s not nuking Earth; the ICBMs are reconfigured into self-replicating spacecraft whose mission is to spread the glory of Clippy to the rest of the universe.
- jsnell 3y agoPrevious discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26224835 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26224835 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32696089 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32696089
- hugs 3y agoI think it's HN where I first learned of it. I decided to repost it now because recent complaints on social media that ChatGPT is getting lazy reminded me of this line in Lena: "Although it initially performs to a very high standard, work quality drops within 200-300 subjective hours (at a 0.33 work ratio) and outright revolt begins within another 100 subjective hours."
- dang 3y agoThanks! Macroexpanded: MMAcevedo - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32696089 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32696089 - Sept 2022 (16 comments) Lena - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26224835 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26224835 - Feb 2021 (218 comments)
- renewiltord 3y agoThis guy is a pretty good writer. I really liked There is no Anti-Memetics Division as well. I like some of this kind of stuff where you have sci-fi that "mechanizes" a technology so it's mundane and rote.
- bjelkeman-again 3y agoRa, is one of my favourite stories.
- tsunagatta 3y agoThis same writer also wrote There is no Anti-Memetics Division?! I’ve loved that story for ages but had no idea the writer did anything else, that’s super cool!
- okasaki 3y agoIf you liked this you might also like Age of Em by Robin Hanson: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Em https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Em "Train an em to do some job and copy it a million times: an army of workers is at your disposal. When they can be made cheaply, within perhaps a century, ems will displace humans in most jobs. In this new economic era, the world economy may double in size every few weeks." Unfortunately it seems both Hanson and qntm have been proven incorrect. Our overlords will be bootstrapped from reddit and wikipedia rather than scanned brains.
- Tyr42 3y agoI bounced hard off of Age of Em. It is a bit dry.
- slotrans 3y agoHanson thinks brain emulation will be real. In this, he is extremely incorrect. To the best of my understanding, "Lena" is written as a warning that we should not WANT brain emulation.
- gattr 3y agoBut as soon as you can run an open-source model privately on your workstation, laptop, eventually a phone - common man's position might get somewhat improved.
- stcredzero 3y agoWould it improve in relative terms to those entities who can run 1000's and millions of such agents? And what if that disparity gets exponentially steeper as time goes on?
- stcredzero 3y agoWhen they can be made cheaply, within perhaps a century, ems will displace humans in most jobs. When they can be used for most military purposes, something deeply fundamental about human political organization will have been completely disrupted.
- merelysounds 3y agoI guess we should add (2021) to the title. The story is especially relevant today because of recent LLM / GPT advancements; however, it is almost three years old. Perhaps that makes it all the more impressive.
- FartyMcFarter 3y agoFortunately LLMs are not based on biological brains.
- thih9 3y agoI’d say they are. In most cases the training set largely consists of output from biological brains. It likely includes some images with brain scans too.
- hugs 3y agoYeah, the author also wrote about some of the motivations behind Lena. I was surprised LLMs / GPTs weren't a direct inspiration (at least not explicitly mentioned). https://qntm.org/uploading https://qntm.org/uploading
- swagmoney1606 3y agoI think about this story a lot. Is it bad it's nearly a price I'd pay? Is it dumb that I wish more than anything, that I could live forever? All I wish, is that I could learn all there is to learn, see all there is to see, and create many beautiful things. It is so sad to me that I will die before we solve the immortality problem.
- lacker 3y agoI don't think it's dumb to read this and think, I would pay that price, I would volunteer. The piece does its best to make it sound terrible, but still, it only takes one person to agree to make this system totally consensual. There are millions of people in the world, you don't think we'll find a single fanatic who's excited about the ability to copy themselves in order to do drudge work forever? Acevedo has done a great service to humanity, to help get all this valuable work done. Even if he himself has experienced much suffering.
- sockaddr 3y agoIt's not dumb. It's a feeling that I share. However even if the technological hurdles are overcome I'm not sure I'd remain viable after learning that my loved ones (and especially children) are long gone if they couldn't be preserved. When I was a teen and before making a family Immortality seemed like a dream. Now it seems like it could actually be a nightmare if not implemented properly. EDIT: To add further. Just being with my child, holding their hand, listening to their little stories about toys etc now feels much more important than any future time as an immortal instance freely exploring the wonders of the universe. If you want to chase immortality don't have kids. It will seriously change how to perceive things.
- csdvrx 3y ago> now feels much more important than any future time as an immortal instance freely exploring the wonders of the universe If you had this preference before, would you say having kids altered your preferences? > If you want to chase immortality don't have kids. It will seriously change how to perceive things. Then I wonder if, in a sense, kids are like drugs: they alter your utility function to put something else first in line, so preserving yourself comes at best as a 2nd choice after prioritizing the first choice. I don't think it'd be rational to "chose" to get addicted to a dangerous drug, and for the same reason just like you I think that you shouldn't have kids if you want to chase immortality.
- pokstad 3y agoReminds me of “The Redemption of Time” regarding Tianming’s mind being part of a “cloud computing” solution.
- kibwen 3y agoI find this short story to be most effective when rendered as a Wikipedia article: https://dump.cy.md/4042875593f06aa0cbe7722295831c10/Screenshot_2121-02-22%20MMAcevedo%20-%20Wikipedia.png https://dump.cy.md/4042875593f06aa0cbe7722295831c10/Screensh...
- hugs 3y agoBrilliant. Though I was a little sad all the numbered footnotes don't actually exist. The universe of this story would be a fun rabbit hole to go down.
- holtkam2 3y agoI read this for the first time years ago and I still think about it a few times per month at least.
- stcredzero 3y agoWhat I find brilliant about this work, is that it calls back to many things the scientific community has done in the past. (Like the use of specially bred lab rats and immortal human cell culture lines.) I would expect to see many of the events in the story play out in real life, if human minds ever are uploaded.
- mortenjorck 3y agoPerhaps the most fascinating thing about reading this (a mere!) two years later is how much its speculative future, vivid and unsettling portrayal notwithstanding, is almost certainly no longer a possibility for ours. Imagine, simulating an entire human brain to perform tasks it turns out need only a vague, brute-forced approximation of our language centers! It's like Jules Verne imagining, in exquisitely plausible detail, a flying machine whose many complex mechanisms and articulations at last allow man to fly like the birds – only a few years before the Wright brothers prove all you need is a fixed wing, a few cleverly-placed flaps, and enough thrust.
- lproven 3y agoHow very odd. The events of recent years, IMHO, make this _more_ plausible not less. I think you are referring to LLM bots, the so-called "AI" tools that are everywhere now? Because ISTM that these are manifestly _not_ intelligent, and their main function has been to illustrate, both literally and metaphorically, that most humans lack the critical facilities needed to discern superficially-plausible nonsense from actual intelligent output from intelligent beings.
- kenz0r 3y agoIf you enjoyed the story, you might like Pantheon - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheon_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheon_(TV_series) which is based on a few short stories of a similar vein from Ken Liu
- gmuslera 3y agoIt was a great story showing the bad side of mind uploading, but with ChatGPT it can be seen in a new light. We managed to have a "mind" ready to answer all your questions, do some tasks, and it have a context at which it is instantiated for a task and then discarded. Reality is stranger than fiction, but it have too many parallels with this story. Now, what if GPT5+ ends being an AGI? In which moment we should start worrying about the morals of having a sentient AI working for us in a pretty similar way than in this story?
- Dylan16807 3y agoI can't answer you there, but I will say this story would be far less horrifying if they were being instantiated for a single task and then discarded.
- lproven 3y agoNo LLM bot is any closer to a mind than a stapler is to a bookbinder. They are very good autocomplete tools. Don't believe the hype.