alt Hacker NewsComments so far miss the point of this story, and likely why it was posted today after the MJ Rathbun episode. It is not about digitised human brains: it's about spinning up workers, and absence of human rights in the digital realm.
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.
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The author is dead. I think we can consider it as much a cautionary tale about digitised human brains as we can about the other things.
[dead]
I was quite disappointed with the essay when I originally read it, specifically this paragraph:
> This is extremely realistic. This is already real. In particular, this is the gig economy. For example, if you consider how Uber works: in practical terms, the Uber drivers work for an algorithm, and the algorithm works for the executives who run Uber.
There seems to be a tacit agreement in polite society that when people say things like the above, you don't point out that, in fact, Uber drivers choose to drive for Uber, can choose to do something else instead, and, if Uber were shut down tomorrow, would in fact be forced to choose some other form of employment which they _evidently do not prefer over their current arrangement_!
Do I think that exploitation of workers is a completely nonsensical idea? No. But there is a burden of proof you have to meet when claiming that people are exploited. You can't just take it as given that everyone who is in a situation that you personally would not choose for yourself is being somehow wronged.
To put it more bluntly: Driving for Uber is not in fact the same thing as being uploaded into a computer and tortured for the equivalent of thousands of years!
> It is not about digitised human brains: it's about spinning up workers
It's about both and neither.