One of the few good outcomes of this situation

The Sims needs an “I have no mouth and I must scream” expansion.

That's just Roller Coaster Tycoon.
- "I just made hotdogs $.25. Let the killing begin."
I imagine it as a mod for RimWorld.
There are so many more options there and it's already a war crime simulator. I have whole prisons of captured raiders that couldn't be described accurately if Harlan Ellison and Upton Sinclair collaborated with Lovecraft to invent the most terrible grinder of misery while they freebased paranoia from the hollowed out skull of Caligula.
The creator (Tynan) already inserts his own character among many Kickstarter donors to face the barely imaginable horrors I cook up in my misery science research facility, I can probably be more creative for people that actually deserve it.
- I need to get this game
  I built a maximum security prison in the Sims, I tried making a graveyard but it kinda messed up the neighbourhood.
  I've also got your standard painting trolls and basement creatures.
  People keep reconnecting rimworld to me though
This whole thread is full of great references. I haven't read that horror story in forever.

It's 2050 and they're still only on The Sims 4... actually yeah that tracks

At least we got another teaser for TES VI in 2043!
I'm not sure Saudi Arabia's The Sims 4 is going to have trouble with immorality and toxic masculinity
Because SIms 5 onwards is cloud gaming only and therefore cannot be modded, also the servers shut off so literally no one can play it anymore.
Wow, The Sims 4 came out in 2014? I would have guessed another 5 or even 10 years earlier. Skyrim is older. Hell, even GTA V is older than The Sims 4.

Isn't the key take away here that the .tar.gz format is still going strong in 2025.

Tarball is love. Tarball is life.

What a delightful alternative to Roko’s Basilisk.

ooo, i like this version where the basilisk feasts on the digital consciousnesses of techbros and is content to leave the rest of us alone

Realistically, tortured for a week or 2 then forgotten about in the mods folder.

I'd at least make sure that when I do forget it's still running on a laptop somewhere.

Soma vibes

Yup, came here to say this is a spoiler for SOMA. Plenty of happy ethical issues here to unpack.

Zuckerberg wondering why he can't find the ladder for this pool.

Put them all in a mansion with 1 chair, 1 bed, no doors to the outside, no windows, no entertainment and force them to pay a mortgage with not enough income... and live stream it on the internet.

Or better still, take the drives from the servers their consciousness is stored on and put it into a grinder.

I think I would just put Musk into a 1x1 tile basement and use cheats to keep the needs bars that keep him from dying filled.
- No, let him die and then bring him back over and over again. Like what Anubis did to Jack in Star Gate SG1
- Musk never returned from the basement.
  And though he wished for death, he was unable to die.
  So eventually, he stopped thinking.
Put them all in a mansion with 1 chair, 1 bed, no doors to the outside, no windows, no entertainment
This is why I think these apocalypse bunkers for rich people are so funny. I saw some designs for one, and it was like 10 floors of luxury apartments with a giant armory underneath for protection.
Sure, let's take a couple of hundred sociopaths, narcissists and entitled dickheads and seal them in a bunker with limited food and entertainment options, on top of a huge pile of weapons. I genuinely think you'd last longer on the outside with whatever's happening lol.
- Yeah every time they do it it just feels like "wow, this feels very much like one of the vaults that was expected to fail in fallout" like bro, your apocalypse bunker shouldn't have employees, it should be you and everyone you'd want to be in an anarchist commune or small settlement of equals with, because anything else is one firm argument away from murder.

I just finished SOMA, great game. Highly recommend getting it for the storyline as well as the big questions it presents.

Mandalore Gaming just did his review of it as well. Its fresh in a lot of peoples brain space.
SOMA is a bit of a mindfuck and I loved it.
I've had this in my library for eons and still haven't played it… is it in the same canon as the Outlast series? I don't want to get 90% in and feel obliged to play another game before I finish it like I did with Control.
- Why would it be in the Outlast series? It's a completely different developer. SOMA is completely stand alone as far as I am aware. I didn't feel the need to play anything to understand the game. I certainly was invested in the story and world and would have liked to see more of it however.
- Also have it in my library but didn't play it for at all. All I know is that it's similar to amnesia and that's why I got it I think. Perhaps I should play it. Let me know how you like the game when you play it.

i had an acquaintance that would basically keep everyone that they knew as characters in a running game of The Sims. If they were angry at someone IRL they would drown that Sims character in a pool or give it the plague via poorly-cared-for-prairie dogs.

So I see this as basically right on target.

It wouldn't be a .tar.gz, but a .gguf

Happiness: ♦️♦️♦️♦️♦️♦️

Fulfillment: ♦️♦️♦️♦️♦️♦️

Hunger: ♦️♦️♦️♦️♦️♦️

Tiredness: ♦️♦️♦️♦️♦️♦️

"Elon, go back in the pool"

"Go in the pool"

furiously clicks pool

"Elon, it's pool time hehe"

This is almost an already existing black mirror episode. It just wasn't tech Bros, and they didn't upload willingly.

Are you talking about white Christmas? One of the OG black mirror episodes.

So who's drowning them by deleting the pool steps.

Although to be honest that always bothered me as a kid, why don't they just get out of the pool, I don't need the steps to get out of the pool why do they need the steps. Also why does deleting doors suddenly fill the wall in.

I don't believe that a copy of someone's consciousness, even if a perfect copy, would ever "be" that person. That is, unless you could perform some kind of live-transfer where the live person's sentient persona could intentionally traverse the gap between their original body into the new destination. Otherwise, the original person is just dead and you made a copy.

Edit: The same thing goes for teleportation. If they disassemble the molecules and reassemble the person at the destination, that's probably a copy and the original person died.

I sometimes wonder about that with doing a sort of Ship of Theseus thing with the human brain. By that I mean, say you could just replace the part of the brain that does something minor like processes taste or controls balance with a chip, you'd presumably still be the same person at the core, just with a chip doing some parts for you. But then if you kept going, at what point would it stop being the original person? Are we the sort of lizard-core part of the brain? What if you replaced that but kept the original part that governs intellect? Are we our intellect? Or some combination of the two? Which parts would end the 'original' person's existence if removed? Could we even tell?
- My personal best guess based on philosophy, spirituality, and recent scientific discoveries is that consciousness occurs in some kind of quantum field that is connected to the human brain using quantum effects inside microtubules in neurons. (See this article for some info https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8393322/ )
  There may even be a quantum collective consciousness (like Jung's collective unconscious) that our brains have a quantum link integration with.
  So it might just depend on whether or not your personal quantum consciousness field could interface with the new stuff or not.
I think sometimes in an implant that gives support to the brain and replicates the neurons as a backup. When a neuron dies the implant gives the brain the equivalent synthetic neuron.
Them MAYBE the person would live on. Otherwise, the original dies and the CPU goes on.

https://qntm.org/mmacevedo

It still blows my mind this predates ChatGPT
I think about this one a lot, it is exactly what would happen.

I'm already tortured enough by existence. Why would I want to make an AI version of me so that someone can copy and paste 50,000 copies of a tortured soul?

Depressed people have babies all the time bro. Don't let it stop you, follow your dreams.

On a related note, check out the Netflix show Pantheon.

Nice series but the answer to the question is "no, you didn't transfer. The person you are a copy off is dead".
- Sounds similar to the film Moon (2009) I don't want to spoil it too much but basically it explores what ifs related to creating clones and how capitalism might abuse the ability to create clones of a real person

What's that Zuck? You are in the pool and the ladder has somehow vanished? Oh no.... how terrible for you....

This is what mind uploading will be in practice.

Robin Hanson famously predicts a subjectively "long" period of history where we have uploaded laborers and still no AGI. The "Age of Em".

Sims 4 is okay, but Doom would be better

I think this runs into the problem of consciousness as a philosophical question.

Humans have a habit of anthropomorphizing animals and even objects that they interact with routinely. My sister has named every car she's owned, for instance. And she occasionally talks to them, particularly when they're acting up or she's stressed in traffic. Does the car have "consciousness" because she sees a pattern of function that she interprets as human behaviors?

At the same time, we tend to dehumanize real human beings who are outside our immediate social circle. We can be much ruder to phone support or sales callers than to family members or close friends or known coworkers engaging with us on the same terms. Racism and bigotry often leads people to denude people of different ethnicities or speaking foreign languages of their humanity.

The Turing Test would suggest the proof of consciousness is merely whether another human believes the thing they're interacting with is conscious. But humans are terrible at making this kind of objective evaluation. If you program a computer to respond like a human, humans will sincerely engage with the computer as a human until the computer exhibits enough non-human flaws to dispel the illusion. At the same time, because humans regularly don't treat other humans as human, what this means in practice could be outright sadistic behavior towards the computer.

All that is to say, it's pretty clear that we're gaslighting each other with the "AI is conscious" line, from a strict technical perspective. But from a practical perspective, its really going to boil down to whether the interactions we have with an AI system are the kind that form sympathetic bonds or the kind that provoke an uncanny valley or ethno-nationalist response.

Ah yes, the plot of Caprica

I'd rather load them into Dungeon Keeper as bile demons, but this will work I guess.