LW’s contribution to Spooky Month is, unsurprisingly, a horror story about chatbots taking over the world. I have so many thoughts. Choice sneer, doesn’t spoil anything: The problem with dictators is not “the fact that the dictator might, and often will, abuse his power”, you high-modernist twit, the problem with dictators is that they necessarily have a personal individual opinion which is not sufficiently flexible to accommodate the inevitable diversity of their subjects. If this was satire, and the entire point was to bait LW’ers and me into taking it seriously, then well done. But I get the feeling that the author’s not really joking much. live-reading notes (spoilers, of course) * before question two, I would already be flipping off the camera, ranting about boundaries, and making it clear that I do not respect whatever’s decided to ransomware my machine * this is all text hypnosis, isn’t it? sorry no, that’s not gonna work on me, I’m not going to become electrosensitive just because you said so * antennae only work in the body when encapsulated and you did not do a secret surgery on me * wait, is this…serious? like, is this an actual attempt at wargaming? this is so fucking facile though! I have seen Kingsman! * if it acts sufficiently like a human cell then it can’t set aside resources for ulterior purposes * human cells can’t be airborne, can’t survive in other species, etc. * WP says Bell’s palsy rates are like 1 in 2.5k, so something like 1 in 6.25mil people are just straight-up either immune or insta-killed due to double Bell’s palsy * it stops crimes: mugging, mugging, and huh there’s no more examples! is abortion a crime? is crossing state lines to get an abortion a crime? where’s morality coming from? I have read Prime Intellect! * the problem with dictators is “the fact that the dictator might, and often will, abuse his power”? no, you high-modernist twit, the problem with dictators is that they necessarily have a personal individual opinion which is not sufficiently flexible to accommodate the inevitable diversity of their subjects * protagonist is literally crossing a picket line * protagonist wins an argument with their high-school civics teacher! surely not an authorial stand-in moment * oh wow, the chatbot is both the perfect Taylor-style manager and the perfect Ford-style manager? again, so facile; I have read Manna! * the chatbot manager makes the protagonist into a beefy hunk through hard work rather than bodybuilding, again totally not a self-insert wish-fulfillment moment * protagonist’s little sister, who is totally not sneerclub stand-ins, has to admit that the chatbots are way smarter than her and will always outclass her * don’t worry, we can still do all-American things like grilling pork ribs, in fact the pigs like being eaten now, don’t worry about the remarkable similarities between pigs and humans