Tom Scott's Fast Forward

[flaksesomlys]

Tom Scott's doing a new series of YouTube videos “from a future. Not the future. Just a future”. Sort of a Black Mirror-esque concept. The second video in the series isn't very interesting IMO, it's basically describing an actual Black Mirror premise without doing anything new with it, but the first one I really liked.

Video link: The Artificial Intelligence That Deleted A Century

Transcript for anyone who doesn't like videos

It might not be the most realistic AI scenario, but I really like the video from a storytelling perspective. For the first half, I assumed Earworm had just deleted all knowledge of the specified media, that the lines about “you've probably never wondered why” were just the standard kind of commentary on how humans can get used to anything, even when that thing might've seemed deeply horrible just a few decades earlier, hint hint you should be more angry about the speaker's pet cause. But then it actually had a way more sinister in-universe explanation. Neat twist, did not see it coming.

Also I wonder what AO3 would look like post-Earworm. It could just wipe their servers, but for the more popular works I feel like it'd be less disruptive to change the character names and the worldbuilding around just enough to make it count as original fiction, 50 Shades-style.

Comments

[contrarianarchon]

Huh. And yeah, I think it'd be easier to change A03 till it was all origional fic. (Which would probably have the nice side-effect of letting us have a bunch of more-or-less copyright free original universes of great popularity. I'd call it a plus).

All in all, not the worst thing that could have happened. (Easy to negotiate with, as far as AI's go, as well. Not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing; does minimizing human disruption mean it'd buffer us from other super-intelligent AIs?)

[flaksesomlys]

It's explicitly preventing anyone from doing AI research and development, so yes, no other AGIs are going to exist in this world. That'd be far too disruptive, no matter if it's friendly or -un. Actually it reminds me of Vetinari's governance philosophy: 'They think they want good government and justice for all, Vimes, yet what is it they really crave, deep in their hearts? Only that things go on as normal and tomorrow is pretty much like today.'

[contrarianarchon]

Ah, what I meant was other equivalent intelligence's moving in from other places, more than our own home-grown ones.

(It's always seemed strange to me that we don't do anything much about the possibility of one of these god-AIs having been some other civilizations fuck-ups, but I guess it's just blind luck if that kills us or not, like some asteroid out of nowhere.)

[flaksesomlys]

Oh, right. I feel like it'd try its damndest, but that may or may not be good enough if it's up against another superintelligence.

[sophus]

My opinion on the twist: "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!"
Also, this would make an interesting glowfic setting to drop extra-universal characters into.

[flaksesomlys]

You're imagining they'd be resistant to the mites? Otherwise I'm not sure there's much story there, the mites would get to them before they knew what was going on, and then when they found out they would by definition be okay with it. (not that it wouldn't be impactful to have someone who'd be completely horrified change into an entirely different template at first contact, I'm just not sure where the story goes from there.)

...also, if they are both resistant and horrified, I bet Earworm would just straight-up kill them, preferably in a plausibly deniable fashion but you can't be too picky when a glowfic protagonist lands on your world if you're against disruptive things happening. So the protagonist would need more superpowers than just mite resistance.

[sophus]

I'm imagining the higher-powered glowfic characters (e.g. a pealed Bell) that'd be immune to the mites (and not immediately smooshed by a territorial Earworm), yeah.
Or alternatively, if they're not immune, you could still get a story out of it if the character in question was one who had backups, who could react to the changes that were made to their fork.

[flaksesomlys]

Ooo, those are both good options! For the second option the Earwormed character could be written by the other author, maybe, both to avoid selfthreading and because it'd be a neat way to make them act all wrong in a billion tiny ways.

For another peal option, consider a native Bell. They'd meet the peal and be able to answer the standard control question ("what are the three questions?") just fine, because they do remember being really into that style of thinking when they were a teenager, before they matured and started caring about other things. The fact that it's still highly relevant to this day for all the others might not come up for a while, and neither would the uninteresting background fact that Earworm exists. (and then when they do find out there'll be Drama, everyone is horrified, it'd be great)

[sophus]

I love everything contained in all of these suggestions, and I want to read these threads now.

Why can't I make writing spontaneously appear by wanting at it hard enough? :(

(As an aside, this setting reminds me of Cordyceps, in a way.)

[flaksesomlys]

I mean, technically you can. The method's called typing.

:p

[sophus]

Darn, you got me there! :P Added to my "thread ideas" list.

...Hm, I need to dust off one of my more OP characters if I want someone who can survive this setting intact.