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

submitted 5 days ago* (last edited 5 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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[-] bencurthoys@mastodon.social 4 points 4 days 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 4 days 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).

[-] bencurthoys@mastodon.social 5 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

@cstross @Amoeba_Girl @Soyweiser My usual handle when playing online games is "Bickel", because I happened to be re-reading "Destination: Void" at the time that I first signed up my World Of Warcraft account, and killing huge numbers of sentient beings in the pursuit of artificial consciousness was definitely not a problem for Frank Herbert =)

[-] Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems 4 points 4 days ago

Herbert is so obsessed with his particular vision of eugenics it ends up back being endearing. Look at our big boy building his big torture worlds just so they can roundaboutly excrete one superman. Such a specific, endlessly restated fetish.

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this post was submitted on 13 May 2025

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