A Perverse Game of Baby Roulette
Scott Aaronson: “Even before you get to any serious software engineering, the applied part of computing involves a never-ending struggle to make machines do what you need them to do—get a document to print, a website to load, a software package to install—in ways that are harrowing and not the slightest bit intellectually interesting. You learn, not about the nature of reality, but only about the terrible design decisions of other people.”
Elizabeth Barber: “Every birth is a risk. And even if one particular baby was fine, what about that baby’s baby, and that baby’s baby? The odds that a desperate child will be born increase over time. Matti calls that eventual offspring the ‘Omelas child,’ after the Ursula K. Le Guin story in which a nine-year-old child is locked in a basement to take on the full weight of all earthly suffering, so that the other residents of the mythical Omelas may be relieved of it. In the antinatalist reading, ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,’ as the story is called, are the ones who decide not to procreate. By putting an end to all life, they put an end to a perverse game of baby roulette, and to the inevitability of someone, somewhere, suffering grievously.”
“New research shows that China has by some metrics eclipsed the United States as the biggest producer of AI talent, with the country generating almost half the world’s top AI researchers.”
