Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus.
Tech company: by inserting human DNA into a bacterium we can make very good insulin that will help diabetics
Online Commenter: this is just like that book where the insulin kills us all!
My take on this entire genre: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Story-Logic_Bias
And Eliezer Yudkowsky’s more eloquent precursor: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rHBdcHGLJ7KvLJQPk/the-logica...
Sci-fi author: in my book I invented the idea of inserting human dna into a bacterium and this GeneKiller bacteria killing protesters to the regime
Tech company: by inserting human DNA into a bacterium we can make very good insulin that will help diabetics. We call it GeneKiller and we offer it to the regime to start testing on protesters first
Online Commenter: this is just like that book where the insulin kills us all!I mean the Jetson's is one of the examples that comes to mind when I'm reaching for a positive example of future robots, the Jetsons! A cartoon from the 1960s is in my top 10 examples of "Positive AI / Robot having futures"
Having a more positive takes on the future would go a long way to helping people understand what they're place in it might be, we did used to have periods of history where things were more positive, right now we're really lacking that perspective
- the kid from the AI movie
- the Sentient Intelligence from the Peter F Hamilton books
I think there are quite a few positive examples if you dig enough. It's just that (a) none of those examples are being used as the mold for what large tech companies are set to achieve, because (b) none of those examples imply the sort of capital or power-concentration incentive that a capitalist company would look for.
If it requires huge capital/power to bring the utopian story into reality and there is no capital/power incentive to do so, these stories will remain on paper.
Whereas, if the Torment Nexus story details how its inventors got to rule the world for a millenium, you can see how it's more interesting for a certain type of person to gather the resources to build it if they have/can acquire the relevant skillset.
If your tech company calls its product "The Genophage™" it's fair to ask if they're taking the safety/ethics implications very seriously.
> taking the safety/ethics implications very seriously
In the era of move fast and break things that includes things like enabling genocide, is an oxymoron.
Look, the issue is two fold:
1) The Zuckerbergs class are insulated naive boys who've never spent time in the real world. So they do not understand that thier actions might have consequences.
2) every fucking tech giant starts out promising liberty, then gradually creates either a blood sucking money printer, or some hellish sock puppet system that props up their warped world view.
(yeah, I know that's not sold in cans, and actually it was Flavor-Aid: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drinking_the_Kool-Aid#Backgrou...)
the 'torment nexus' is what you'd call heaven if we built it and you weren't in it"
https://x.com/AlexBlechman/status/1457842724128833538?lang=e...
Like, I love the Torment Nexus trope, but it's somehow gotten coined with the worst first example imaginable, and the only reason it works as a meme is that nobody realizes this.
(The problem with the Zuckerverse is exactly that it's not the Metaverse from Snow Crash. The whole point of the Metaverse is that it's built on open protocols! It's literally got a geometric representation of IPv4 in it!)
Also, "sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". Both can be made good and evil.
A mentally unstable person being “made” to do something by a chatbot is no different from other mentally unstable people doing bad things because they saw them in a TV show.
Rest of us have some chance to stand against persuasion.
It's worked pretty well for Palantir?
(On second thought, the LLM probably made up this analogy on its own, which... in a way, is even worse.)
https://nypost.com/2025/04/16/entertainment/american-psycho-...