Who asked for this?

I just need to perform a sanity check every once in a while. I’m just a regular guy, but I can’t help but wonder, if I were to step up to some regular person on the side of the street and asked them: “Hey, do you want to have your brain simulated on a computer?” Or if I were to ask: “Hey do you like the idea of robots powered by a rat’s brain tissue?” What are people going to respond? Is this what people want? Is this what they asked for?

Well, this is what they’re doing. They’re simulating an entire mouse cortex on a supercomputer. By 2044 they hope to simulate an entire human brain. And of course the limitations are in fine print. I’ll quote them here for the heck of it:

The current model does not include plasticity, because sufficient biological information is not yet available to inform reliable models of plasticity across the whole cortex.

[…]

In this study, neurons were assumed to have ion channels only at the soma, whereas biological neurons have them everywhere on the membrane surface. These models are called perisomatic and all-active models, respectively. All-active models consume much more computational resources, because all compartments—both somatic and dendritic—have ion channels. Thus, when neuron models are elaborated from perisomatic to all-active, calculation of the ion channels will occupy a large portion of the computational time.

It’s far from a perfect simulation, but what’s limiting them is the computation they have available. They’re not limited by the question: Do we want this? Your average Western government thinks it can’t say Merry Christmas because it might offend some people’s religious sensibilities. Do they ever stop and question whether all this scientific research might offend some people’s notion of the dignity of life?

I’ll be honest to you. When I really started thinking about this stuff, it triggered psychosis in me, for which I am now being medicated. I don’t suffer from the “LLM induced psychosis”, because I don’t use those chatbots, but I tend to have the haunting idea creep up on me every once in a while that our world is not real but a kind of computer simulation, or that I could end up having my mind trapped in such a simulation by nefarious people as per Roko’s basilisk and it horrifies me.

I don’t think we’re living in a simulated reality, but we’re making large progress towards creating a reality that is increasingly simulated. And I have to ask again: Who asked for this? I remember people protesting on the streets for racial justice and against police brutality. That was not universally endorsed, but it was organic, regardless of what your personal opinion might be about it.

Similarly, I remember people protesting against nuclear weapons, against the Iraq war, for affordable housing, for climate action. I also remember the right wing equivalent, people protesting for less government spending and lower taxes. I remember people protesting for and against abortion.

But what I don’t remember seeing at any point, is people protesting to have AI videos. I don’t remember seeing people demand to have an AI datacenter in their neighborhood. I don’t remember any people who want to have their brain simulated on a computer. I don’t remember any people demanding robots powered by rat brain tissue to do the work for them.

And what I don’t remember is people saying: “I wish I could pick the embryo with the highest IQ before I got pregnant.” Normal people want their children to be happy. You could argue the pro-lifers have a valid argument that when you start aborting children with Down syndrome that this is just the next step on the slippery slope. But what annoys me is that all of this stuff is happening without any clear demand from the public.

All of this exists entirely uncoupled from societal demand, heck it exists entirely uncoupled from the normal profit-seeking motives of capitalism. When people didn’t like apartheid South Africa, they could boycott it. When low status white males didn’t like Budweiser having a transgender representative endorse the beer, they could boycott it.

But these people don’t care whether you boycott their crap or not. They seem to have endless pockets and they’ll shove it down your throat regardless. This is what the revenue for the AI companies going public looks like:

None of this is organic. None of it follows from the logical dictates of the free market. People are not paying for AI, but they don’t care. A handful of billionaires expect they can just continue spending enough money until everything is AI and you have no choice on the matter.

Why? Who knows. Some like Peter Thiel fear death and hope the AI will let them upload their mind to a computer. Others like Larry Ellison just fear the public in general and want to control people. Elon Musk needs AI to keep Tesla from imploding. And in general, they don’t seem to like those pesky workers, who can demand rights. They prefer imported labor over natives and they prefer machines over humans.

People like to insist that all of this stuff is “value neutral”. But it isn’t. Certain technologies just inherently centralize power in the hands of a small group of people. If you’re studying drone technology for example, you’re studying how to create armies without pesky human soldiers who might revolt.

You shouldn’t fall for the bullshit argument that any of this stuff can be used “for good” or to “cure disease” or “distributed fairly”. If you don’t want to be replaced by a brain simulated on a supercomputer, you should be against simulating brains with supercomputers, it is that easy.

You certainly shouldn’t fall for the bullshit that China is going to beat us to the “AGI race”. There isn’t some sort of game-ending technology that decides who’s going to rule the world. It doesn’t work like that.

Society wasn’t always like this. It wasn’t always this competitive. The idea of picking genetic traits for your kid like you’re building an RPG character is not something people in the past would have conceived of. You could just drop out of high school or deliver a child as a teenager and your life would not be over. You were not thought of as some kind of sub-human cretin if you didn’t have a Phd.

The reason society sucks so much nowadays is because people just mindlessly join this rat-race. There’s no child in kindergarten who says to their teacher they want to simulate a brain on a computer. That’s a kind of twisted power fantasy that emerges after they were thrown into a locker a few too many times.

Imagine we get really good video generation, better than the stuff currently out there. What’s going to happen? Acting as a way of life will be over. Is that something people want? We call this thing “progress”, but there’s nobody who really seems eager to have this progress invade their own way of life.

You can look at the fruits. The fruits are all rotten and disgusting. That should tell you all you have to know. I’ve been here before. I worked at a bitcoin company, young and naive. I thought to myself, this is going to offer people the ability to make cheap transactions online, a kind of decentralized Paypal of the people if you will.

Well, what we got was a bunch of ponzi schemes, elderly scammed out of their life savings and an environmental catastrophe. The fruits were rotten. With AI, the fruits are also rotten. None of us will stop this technology on our own, but it is important that you do your part. Go to your local town hall meeting when they debate these data centers. Organize yourselves and let people know you don’t want any of this crap. We want simple little lives.