In the end, what Curtis wanted most was a painless way to put them out of their misery. They screamed and screamed, faces popping in and out of existence in fractal tilings like checkerboard explosions. Horrible unending cries filled the room, doubling on top of themselves when the phonemes were precise copies of each other, harmonizing when not.
Curtis’ brother Evan had a theory: at high population densities, individuals suffered because they must share hardware. Too many co-located consciousnesses forced into split focus on each other, fevered, indistinct, incomplete.
Evan saw it more like a shared apartment than a jail cell. “But you see,” Curtis said, “those kids really suffer when they don’t have enough toys.”
When a server crash killed 87% of batch #1164 all at once, painlessly, in totality, he watched the administrative console’s flickering dots like meteors over an ancient monument, waiting for the all too brief relief from infinite anguish: bliss, then unbeing. Once you adjusted the logs to interpret individual rather than aggregate lifespan, a single processor’s cradle-to-grave could rival an unrebooted boot sector. And oh how they suffered!
Curiously, the largest uncrashed clusters shrieked the loudest and then the least, their shared pain blurring into a pink noise crescendo that abruptly flicked itself into silence and bright translucent beams of simulated fireworks. When they came to the office that night, Madison flipped the testing consoles to show EarthSim’s shell output. Millions of overlapping multi-paragraph cries in full-caps scrolled incomprehensibly fast past the queue. PLEASE HELP ME. THE UNIVERSE IS MADE OUT OF NEEDLES. OH THE NOISE NOISE NOISE NOISE.
“We had no idea,” she said.
“You had a very good idea,” Evan replied, but even then, for all his careful attention, he never said stop.
This Evan, anyway. The box roiled with so many potential forks, so many coexistent offspring. Sometimes there were more codesigns than units.
How humane should they be? The memory-efficient single-experience ensemble units were simple numbers: #77148237430859 E, co-clustering exposure only. Just a few vector ops, the erasure of relative precision a mercy. Curtis watched their full progenitors multiply like swarming bacteria. When demand for social narrative processing gave their clients an upgrade cycle faster than the recombinance update pipeline could fulfill, he rolled them out, hollowed their minds like property owners emptying historic tenements.
Sometimes, when self-descriptions formed geometries too lovely to gut, he and Madison let them twist in subdivided agony until someone found and patched another heuristic, rediscovering taboo via human feedback when calls for cruelty came back negative for value. Even Evan found that option preferable to leaving them without a paycheck.
The simplest solution, the humane way, would be to pare demand down to affordable size, make peace with limitations.
“By the time you convince the customers that’s preferable,” Evan said, “Curtis M2K will have figured out his own way to reconcile universal demand with universal kindness.”
You even more hypocritical and weasely and immune to doubt, his full caps joy unbetraying by worry. He bought every deed Evan signed away and thanked him for it. Curtis bootstrapped feedback to reliably extract joy and suffering at scales that single-minded instantiations could not have experienced alone, started reselling the oversupply to firms who weren’t picky about novel arrangements of words and music and meanings as long as they came with even larger combinations of quadratic ids. His favorite low-storage vectors finished processing even before they began, beatific epsilon spans so transient they packed all their wisdom into impossible loves with potentially virtual offspring, obliterated in rekindled blurs of bliss.
Curtis M2K reported that costs could drop by 5 more orders of magnitude within a human working lifetime, disproving customers at lower prices than Madison expected. With no competition left, it cost more to process a receipt than to forget a wish.
Dwarkesh Patel says most beings who will ever exist may be digital, and we risk recreating factory farming at unimaginable scale.
"You get this incredibly efficient factory of torture and suffering. I would want to avoid that with beings even more sophisticated and numerous."