Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by echelon 2113 days ago
I'd be worried some rich psychopath (actually, probably an AI) would resurrect people and put them into a torture dungeon for eternity.

Imagine never being able to die. Only suffer.

No mouth, must scream vibes.

Who knows what the future holds.

But in the remote chance this is what the future holds, the AI may not even need your body. It might be able to simulate you up to the moment of your death. Or find some quirk of physics and pull you forward in time. To suffer forever.

Or maybe it's benevolent and lets us live in an eternity of bliss?

Maybe it gets bored and does this for all humans that ever lived. There might be some arbitrary criteria or some random number generator it uses to decide your fate.

I find all of this much more compelling than religion's perspective of the afterlife.

Take that, Basilisk. My machination is worse (or better).

2 comments

You really ought to read I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream. The author has already thought of basically the same thing and written a rather compelling yet disturbing short story about. In 1967, no less.
Oh, I have. It's fantastic.

But if we're going to give unfathomable power to such an AI, it's not much more of a leap to give it the ability to resurrect people from the past and subject them to whatever it desires.

Taking it even one step further and comparing it to the Simulation Hypothesis [1], perhaps we're already there. The machine might be making us live our lives again only at some point to surprise us with some unthinkable horror or delight.

If such a machine arises and is capable of these feats, then we might currently be living in re-simulations of our past lives that have already ended.

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

So... Satan with a science fiction coat?