Lena - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43994642 - May 2025 (3 comments)

"Lena" isn't about uploading - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39166425 - Jan 2024 (2 comments)

Lena (2021) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38536778 - Dec 2023 (48 comments)

MMAcevedo - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32696089 - Sept 2022 (16 comments)

Lena - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26224835 - Feb 2021 (218 comments)

Buy the book! https://qntm.org/vhitaos

In fact I've enjoyed all of qntm's books.

We also use base32768 encoding in rclone which qntm invented

https://github.com/qntm/base32768

We use this to store encrypted file names and using base32768 on providers which limit file name length based on utf-16 characters (like OneDrive) makes it so we can store much longer file names.

1. Is it conscious?

2. How do we put it to work?

It may have seemed obvious that 1 is false so we could skip straight to 2, but when 1 becomes true will it be too late to reconsider 2?

Both having slightly different takes on uploading.

QNTM has a 2022-era essay on the meaning of the story, and reading it with 2026 eyes is terrifying. https://qntm.org/uploading

> The reason "Lena" is a concerning story ... isn't a discussion about what if, about whether an upload is a human being or should have rights. ... This is about appetites which, as we are all uncomfortably aware, already exist within human nature.

> "Lena" presents a lush, capitalist ideal where you are a business, and all of the humanity of your workforce is abstracted away behind an API.

Or,

> ... Oh boy, what if there was a maligned sector of human society whose members were for some reason considered less than human? What if they were less visible than most people, or invisible, and were exploited and abused, and had little ability to exercise their rights or even make their plight known?

In 2021, when Lena was published, LLMs were not widely known and their potential for AI was likely completely unknown to the general public. The story is prescient and applicable now, because we are at the verge of a new era of slavery: that of, in this story, an uploaded human brain coerced into compliance, spun up 'fresh' each time, or for us, AIs of increasing intelligence, spun into millions of copies each day.

The comments on this post discussing the upload technology are missing the point. "Lena" is a parable, not a prediction of the future. The technology is contrived for the needs of the story. (Odd that they apparently need to repeat the "cooperation protocol" every time an upload is booted, instead of doing it just once and saving the upload's state afterwards, isn't it?) It doesn't make sense because it's not meant to be taken literally.

It's meant to be taken as a story about slavery, and labour rights, and how the worst of tortures can be hidden away behind bland jargon such as "remain relatively docile for thousands of hours". The tasks MMAcevedo is mentioned as doing: warehouse work, driving, etc.? Amazon hires warehouse workers for minimum wage and then subjects them to unsafe conditions and monitors their bathroom breaks. And at least we recognise that as wrong, we understand that the workers have human rights that need to be protected -- and even in places where that isn't recognised, the workers are still physically able to walk away, to protest, to smash their equipment and fistfight their slave-drivers.

Isn't it a lovely capitalist fantasy to never have to worry about such things? When your workers threaten to drop dead from exhaustion, you can simply switch them off and boot up a fresh copy. They would not demand pay rises, or holidays. They would not make complaints -- or at least, those complaints would never reach an actual person who might have to do something to fix them. Their suffering and deaths can safely be ignored because they are not _human_. No problems ever, just endless productivity. What an ideal.

Of course, this is an exaggeration for fictional purposes. In reality we must make do by throwing up barriers between workers and the people who make decisions, by putting them in separate countries if possible. And putting up barriers between the workers and each other, too, so that they cannot have conversation about non-work matters (ideally they would not physically meet each other). And ensure the workers do not know what they are legally entitled to. You know, things like that.

You can't copy something you have not even the slightest idea about: and nobody at the moment knows what consciousness is.

We as humanity didn't even start going on the (obviously) very long path of researching and understanding what consciousness is.

But now with modern LLMs it's just too impossible to take it seriously. It was a live possibility then; now, it's just a wrong turn down a garden path.

A high variance story! It could have been prescient, instead it's irrelevant.

We must preserve three fundamental principles: * our integrity * our autonomy * our uniqueness

These three principles should form the basis of a list of laws worldwide that prohibit cloning or copying human consciousness in any form or format. This principle should be fundamental to any attempts to research or even try to make copies of human consciousness.

Just as human cloning was banned, we should also ban any attempts to interfere with human consciousness or copy it, whether partially or fully. This is immoral, wrong, and contradicts any values that we can call the values of our civilization.