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Marshall Brain has died

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Re: Marshall Brain has died

#131

Post by bryanrasmussen »

simpaticoder wrote: post #12
monocasa wrote: post #6

I'm going to use this time to drop the Marshall Brain work that had the biggest impact on me, and is some of the most prescient speculative fiction I've read. Manna: Two Views of Humanity’s Future He contracts two societies. One is a dystopia where AI very, very similar to today's ML models is integrated into society as a replacement for the middle class, removing social mobility as well as acting as a panopticon low…

Very cool story, quite impactful on my thinking, although I will caution that the dystopia is better conceived than the utopia, mainly because the later requires inventing fantasy technology while the former does not. Indeed it's not clear at all what forces might destabalize the dystopia, since the power structures are immortal and self-replicating, and physics and biology (at least) prevents the utopia from existin…

>the later requires inventing fantasy technology while the former does not.

are you sure that the technology of the former was not really fantasy technology - as in not possible yet at the time of writing? I think it probably isn't quite possible yet at this time, although some people I'm sure are hoping to make it.

Re: Marshall Brain has died

#132

Post by pabs3 »

grupthink wrote: post #102

I loved his articles and stories. Hopefully his sites are archived before being taken down.

ArchiveTeam are working on it, his main site is saved by ArchiveBot:

https://wiki.archiveteam.org/ https://archive.fart.website/archivebot/viewer/?q=marshallbr...

He seems to have a lot of domains, if you know of any, please post them here.

Re: Marshall Brain has died

#133

Post by slfnflctd »

nashashmi wrote: post #62
slfnflctd wrote: post #54

A gut punch for me. He was influential in many ways, as multiple comments here have already attested-- in particular the 'Manna' story that has been mentioned several times, which definitely knocked my socks off. Since no one else has brought it up yet, I want to say that one of his websites, "Why Won't God Heal Amputees" ( https://whywontgodhealamputees.com/ ) was very important in my world. It may not exactly be th…

Obviously someone who has come to atheism is not going to speak well of prayer. The guy ends each section with more questions than answers. And each of those questions comes from a highly confused state about what religion is, about what prayer is, about what God is. And maybe even what your purpose is. In the words of the Bible, “ the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light…

> a highly confused state about what religion is, about what prayer is, about what God is.

These are all incredibly subjective concepts with a multitude of meanings to different people. Plenty of people are confused about them, because they simply cannot be universally defined and are therefore by their very nature confusing.

For better or worse, large numbers of humans believe in a literal, conscious deity who can read their thoughts and then act upon the real world to make physical changes in it, provided they shape those thoughts 'just so'. There is no hard evidence these kinds of beliefs are true, and at least some evidence that they can be harmful.

I am not opposed to prayer. I even still do it myself sometimes. However, I think people should be more careful about making strong claims that anyone is actually listening to those prayers, let alone acting on them. Marshall Brain's website helped me to much better understand and articulate this in simple, concrete terms.

Re: Marshall Brain has died

#135

Post by lores »

vacuity wrote: post #95
ben_w wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you conflating "unconsciousness" with "higher power" here?

If we want the highest level of rigor, claims such as "the unconscious is/isn't influenced by a higher power" aren't falsifiable. Anything that you aren't aware of can't be explained by you. Others can examine your mental state, but your perception of others is itself a part of your mental state. It's solipsism, in a sense. By definition, a higher power that transcends our ability to comprehend can't be verified or d…

But considering a higher power as even a plausible hypothesis is purely due to historical reasons. Alien mind control, Illuminati mind control, living in a simulation, or humans being the fruiting body of Gaia would be impatiently dismissed despite requiring fewer assumptions than an all-powerful entity. Why should that idea even be entertained, rigorously speaking?

Re: Marshall Brain has died

#137

Post by mst »

ben_w wrote: post #92
simpaticoder wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very cool story, quite impactful on my thinking, although I will caution that the dystopia is better conceived than the utopia, mainly because the later requires inventing fantasy technology while the former does not. Indeed it's not clear at all what forces might destabalize the dystopia, since the power structures are immortal and self-replicating, and physics and biology (at least) prevents the utopia from existin…

> In fact I would love to read a sequel where the dystopia wins and AI-empowered oligarchs and human wage slaves create generation ships to nearby stars and eventually setup fast food restaurants in every corner of the galaxy. The dystopian part was only enabled (within the story) by the fact that humans were utterly unnecessary to the rich. None had any jobs, because the AI could do all for less… so why would the ol…

I'd be very surprised if the oligarchs didn't still employ humans.

If nothing else, it's a way of demonstrating status - "sure, I could have an AI do it more cheaply, but instead I have an actual sentient being doing my bidding, because I can."

To give a parallel that I think is reasonably illustrative, it would not at all surprise me if in the future everybody else uses fully automated self driving vehicles, but the truly rich still hire chauffeurs.

Past a certain point of wealth, "because it would be cheaper" becomes a socially enforced reason to *not* do something.

Re: Marshall Brain has died

#138

Post by mst »

benreesman wrote: post #79
robertlagrant wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only clear distinction between the utopia and the dystopia is on wealth distribution. A utopia where everyone is starving vs a dystopia where some people are fabulously wealthy but almost everyone has basic healthcare and education and opportunity to succeed? Inequality isn't anywhere near as important as the baseline of what most people have available to them.

Inequality is destructive because it creates upwards pressure on real asset prices, with housing probably being the best example, which creates downward pressure on the real standard of living at the median. Most of the developed world is going through one version or another of this right now . Housing cost crises everywhere from Vancouver to NYC to Tampa to London are far too sharp, far too recent, and far to correl…

> Housing cost crises everywhere from Vancouver to NYC to Tampa to London are far too sharp, far too recent, and far to correlated with the concentration of assets at the top of the wealth distribution to be “because we need to build more housing”.

And yet Austin actually *has* built more housing, and prices have come down.

Maybe in five or ten years it'll look more like you describe, but it sure doesn't yet.

Re: Marshall Brain has died

#139

Post by robertlagrant »

rqtwteye wrote: post #85
norir wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In that hypothetical world, I am quite sure that people would adapt to their improved material conditions and still become resentful at wealth inequality. A lesser version of this already exists in the US. Go to a relatively poor US community and it is almost unimaginably wealthy compared to past generations and other places in the world.

The line that people have it so much better than previous generations or other countries is almost always aimed at the lower ranks of society. Nobody tells the billionaires how good they have it.

> Nobody tells the billionaires how good they have it.

Where do these odd claims come from? Of course people say that, a lot.

Re: Marshall Brain has died

#140

Post by ben_w »

mst wrote: post #137
ben_w wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In fact I would love to read a sequel where the dystopia wins and AI-empowered oligarchs and human wage slaves create generation ships to nearby stars and eventually setup fast food restaurants in every corner of the galaxy. The dystopian part was only enabled (within the story) by the fact that humans were utterly unnecessary to the rich. None had any jobs, because the AI could do all for less… so why would the ol…

I'd be very surprised if the oligarchs didn't still employ humans. If nothing else, it's a way of demonstrating status - "sure, I could have an AI do it more cheaply, but instead I have an actual sentient being doing my bidding, because I can." To give a parallel that I think is reasonably illustrative, it would not at all surprise me if in the future everybody else uses fully automated self driving vehicles, but the…

In real life sure, and I've made similar suggestions myself[0], but within the story that was not something I remember. Would break continuity if done as a sequel, I think.

[0] From https://benwheatley.github.io/blog/2024/11/18-13.16.17.html

"""AI could disrupt the economics of our current world more dramatically than industrialisation, whether under capitalism or communism, disrupted feudalism; but that is a very different question than "will it take all our jobs", especially as the super-rich have repeatedly shown that they like to show off their wealth by [wasting it on unnecessarily][1] [expensive things that are often worse than the cheap equivalent][2], even in a dystopian world where super-rich owners of AI have it all and the rest of us get their scraps, there's going to be jobs."""

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folly

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20240526081630/https://gizmodo.c...

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