We’re in a future not particularly long after a hard takeoff Singularity (changes to the environment described as quite sudden rather than gradual).
This is a multipolar AI scenario, given that the Origami Men claim to have purchased these humans from another entity that owned them.
The Origami Men (or the entity operating them) is severely misaligned but not to an omnicidal degree. It appears to value (bad) proxies for human wellbeing, such as ensuring that they have jobs, pets, residences and food. They either do not understand or do not care that their implementation is… subpar. We might as well call it the Uncanny Valley of Care.
They seem to have some more subtle store of value, in the sense that they desire to only rear humans who do not actively breach containment, or who do not spread memes about breaking out (“contagion”). The general impetus behind the cull or reclamation is not clear to me, do they initially just pick people at random? Or does the narrator finding something “beautiful” in the people chose correlate to an unknown preference? They will take you if you get too close to the border of the dome, but general discontent is not policed. Nor is attempts at violence against the Origami Men, though that appears entirely futile.
“Provenance”? Do they only value pre-Singularity specimens? That would explain lack of any evidence of artificially boosting human numbers or encouraging reproduction.
Re (1) and (2) I thought humans had created misaligned AI that took over and scanned everyone’s brains then sold us to aliens that care about humans in sub-par ways. Hence it being far from the singularity but feeling close from the humans’ perspectives, and the origami men going somewhere that seems more organic than machiney
Oh, I parsed it as a single misaligned AI, which purchased us from the society we had built. It became a more effective market actor than anything else, it reaped the reward, and then it bought us.
Here’s how I parsed this:
We’re in a future not particularly long after a hard takeoff Singularity (changes to the environment described as quite sudden rather than gradual).
This is a multipolar AI scenario, given that the Origami Men claim to have purchased these humans from another entity that owned them.
The Origami Men (or the entity operating them) is severely misaligned but not to an omnicidal degree. It appears to value (bad) proxies for human wellbeing, such as ensuring that they have jobs, pets, residences and food. They either do not understand or do not care that their implementation is… subpar. We might as well call it the Uncanny Valley of Care.
They seem to have some more subtle store of value, in the sense that they desire to only rear humans who do not actively breach containment, or who do not spread memes about breaking out (“contagion”). The general impetus behind the cull or reclamation is not clear to me, do they initially just pick people at random? Or does the narrator finding something “beautiful” in the people chose correlate to an unknown preference? They will take you if you get too close to the border of the dome, but general discontent is not policed. Nor is attempts at violence against the Origami Men, though that appears entirely futile.
“Provenance”? Do they only value pre-Singularity specimens? That would explain lack of any evidence of artificially boosting human numbers or encouraging reproduction.
Re (1) and (2) I thought humans had created misaligned AI that took over and scanned everyone’s brains then sold us to aliens that care about humans in sub-par ways. Hence it being far from the singularity but feeling close from the humans’ perspectives, and the origami men going somewhere that seems more organic than machiney
Oh, I parsed it as a single misaligned AI, which purchased us from the society we had built. It became a more effective market actor than anything else, it reaped the reward, and then it bought us.