Death and the Gorgon - Greg Egan (asimovs.com)

submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by Soyweiser@awful.systems to c/sneerclub@awful.systems

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Begrudgingly Yeast (@begrudginglyyeast.bsky.social) on bsky informed me that I should read this short story called 'Death and the Gorgon' by Greg Egan as he has a good handle on the subjects/subjects we talk about. We have talked about Greg before on Reddit.

I was glad I did, so going to suggest that more people he do it. The only complaint you can have is that it gives no real 'steelman' airtime to the subjects/subjects it is being negative about. But well, he doesn't have to, he isn't the guardian. Anyway, not going to spoil it, best to just give it a read.

And if you are wondering, did the lesswrongers also read it? Of course: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hx5EkHFH5hGzngZDs/comment-on-death-and-the-gorgon (Warning, spoilers for the story)

(Note im not sure this pdf was intended to be public, I did find it on google, but might not be meant to be accessible this way).

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[-] Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems 9 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

I've avoided reading Greg Egan until like last year because I entirely expected him to be a cold stemlord shithead and people only talk about his earlier books that have more to do with consciousness and identity and stuff, which these days feels very zzzzz, but he is SO COOL and SO FUN!!! He cares in a deep way about people, lived experience, about societies, he loves physics and maths in themselves because they're beautiful and fun and not because they're ways to look smart or reveal the secrets of the universe, his books are very beautiful. Complete opposite of Yud, Scott, nostalgebraist (I have a grudge) et al.'s silly books.

[-] bencurthoys@mastodon.social 4 points 1 day ago

@Amoeba_Girl @Soyweiser I read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permutation_City and found something about it seemed deeply wrong in ways that I had trouble articulating.

It's like when you see a bogus mathematical proof of a statement that you know to be false, but the mistake is hidden deep and you can't tell where it has gone wrong, you just know it has.

[-] cstross@wandering.shop 5 points 1 day ago

@bencurthoys @Amoeba_Girl @Soyweiser I'm pretty sure that about 10-20 years ago Egan came out with a serious repudiation of his own ideas about achieving AI through iterated simulations of less-intelligent entities: he noted that implementing it was implicitly genocidal (by murdering all entities that didn't *quite* meet some threshold set by the experimenters, you'd inevitably kill huge numbers of sentient beings just for failing an arbitrary test).

[-] gerikson@awful.systems 5 points 1 day ago

There's a fun/horrifying scene in Ken McLeod's Stone Canal where the protagonists revive superhuman intelligences from cold storage, get the answers they need from them, then destroy them with nanotech the superhumans have not developed defenses against. As one of them says when confronted: "standard programming practice, keep the source code, blow away the object code".

(It's partially justified that if left alone the superintelligences will just iteratively bootstrap themselves into catatonic insanity anyway)

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this post was submitted on 13 May 2025

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