Editorial: For Your Safety, What It Isn't

[jeriendhal]

So this morning I was perusing my books on Amazon, looking through the "People who have bought this book have also purchased" section at the bottom, trying to figure out what audience I'm appealing to. Under the original FYS story were my own stories, the usual slew of Furry tales, a smattering of M.C.A. Hogarth's works (Big crossover there. Not sure why, aside from me commenting in her LJ occasionally.) and a new one.

SJW's Always Lie, by Vox Day.

Gaaaaaaaah. [1]

Okay, look, I know perfectly well there's a strong theme of Nanny State Run Amuck in the FYS universe. When you've got a story set up around an AI that wants to help Humanity whether it wants it or not, that's inevitable. But when the first story was begun there was no theme at all, aside from "Guy is running away from people who want to help him." It was literally a one-off scenelet that seems over the past couple of years to have grown a life of its own, revolving around the Groupmind, the Morphs, and the humans, all spinning around each other, trying (and mostly failing) to figure out what the others are thinking. [2]

I am not championing a rejection of government funded food stamps, health care, Social Security, environmental protection, oversight of financial institutions, or laws preventing people from being racist/misogynist dickweeds to others.

Society is not divided between Randian Manly Men and losers who only exist to suck on the breast of government assistance [3] and anyone who uses the label"Social Justice Warrior" as an insult deserves to be punched in the nose.

Taxes are not evil. I rather like the idea of being able to drive across the country on un-tolled roads thanks to the Interstate Highway System, having at least a minimum guaranteed income after I retire (and just being able to retire) and also the idea of not being solely dependent on an accountant in some private health insurance company deciding whether keeping me alive is cost effective or not.

Like many sci-fi dystopias, For Your Safety takes a current modern anxiety and amplifies it to a logical extreme. The For Your Safety universe's anxiety is the idea of making human's obsolete. This is perhaps currently best laid out in CGP Grey's tract Humans Need Not Apply. If a robot not only can drive more efficiently, build cars more efficiently, deliver goods from a warehouse more efficiently than a human being, and possibly produce music and art indistinguishable from a human being's work, where does that leave us?

I don't know.

But in the coming years we have to figure it out. Because the enemy isn't going to be gently smothering AI trying to save us. It's going to be an accountant who figures humans are too expensive to keep in the production loop.

[1] I keep scrubbing and scrubbing but the stain won't come out...

[2] Also happyfunsexytymes with furry robots, but that's mostly just Anna and Khan. ;p

[3] Really, Galt's Gulch only works until the guy with his personal strip mine starts poisoning the water supply of the farmer downriver...

Comments

[m-danson.livejournal.com]

If a robot not only can drive more efficiently, build cars more efficiently, deliver goods from a warehouse more efficiently than a human being, and possibly produce music and art indistinguishable from a human being's work, where does that leave us?


With time and energy to pursue the interests that capture our minds and hearts. With time and energy to spend with each other in the relationships we value. With time and energy to invent and explore. I generally see this as more of a utopia after adjustment than dystopia. We (western) humans tend to equate lack of a job with lack of value or worth and punish accordingly. That's a problem with our value system not the work or lack thereof.

Hell, switch "AI" to "women", and "human beings" to "men" and the whole argument about human obsolescence starts to sound like an MRA anxiety fantasy.