After playing the game for 10+ hours and dropping it out of sheer frustration, I came to the conclusion that I must have been playing a vastly different game than the people praising it.
The first hour was great. I was constantly encountering new rooms and solving puzzles. The many times where the game decided to give me nothing but rooms leading to dead ends was annoying, but I still had things to explore in the next run so it didn't matter that much.
After that first hour, the game became a slog. I encountered the same rooms, solved the same two puzzles for resources and was constantly praying for the RNG to give me something new.
There is some RNG manipulation, but not enough to mitigate the boring part of the game.
There are a few interesting overarching puzzles, but most of them are wrapped in multiple layers of RNG.
For example, for one puzzle you need a specific item that randomly spawns, use it in a room that randomly spawns which you need to unlock with another room that also randomly spawns.
It took me 6 hours for the game to give me a run where I got all three of those things in a single run.
The reward? Some resources that I have next to no use for and some clues that I can only experiment with if the RNG deems me worthy.
I have absolutely no idea where the praise for the game comes from. Maybe this game is perfect for those who are really into roguelites, but for me personally it just feels like the game is wasting my time for no reason at all.
I read this[1] review on Steam which also raises the same point as you.
The thing that made The Talos Principle, The Witness[2] and similar games so great was that they spent a lot of time on designing the puzzles.
I'm not opposed to a Groundhog Day sort of scenario, but in that case it really needs to be done well, like The Stanley Parable, not just rely on pure RNG. If you want to use RNG you really should have some constraint system involved to ensure at least some progress could have been made by the player.
I generally have the same frustration with roguelites as you seem to: every time I start a run, it feels like I'm gambling whether I'll have any fun at all. A bad seed or start can mean losing in ways that feel unfair or boring, like in balatro if you get a bunch of bad hands and bad jokers, you struggle through rounds and hands until you either lose or get an interesting combination. I don't need that kind of gambling in my life when there's tons of games out there where I know I will have fun.
E: I still quite like Balatro - when it works it's a blast. I'll also still try out Blue Prince because people I respect seem to like it.
> I still quite like Balatro - when it works it's a blast
I enjoyed Balatro for quite a few hours before I had this problem, which is more than enough for me to call it a good game.
Beyond these first few hours though, you need ridiculously high multipliers to succeed. There's way too many jokers and 90% of them are trash by this point. The ones you need have vanishingly small probabilities, and then you need to add those probabilities together to get the combo of jokers required.
I would start a run, and within the first few minutes I would know that the RNG hadn't given me what I needed, reset, start again, repeat.
I looked up some guides, and they'd recommend using specific legendary jokers, which over my entire time playing (maybe 15 hours?) I didn't encounter even once. The only way to get them would be to play hundreds or even thousands of times.
At that point, it doesn't feel like a game anymore. It feels like a gambling addiction.
For me, that's time to call it quits. But I do wonder if the same people who struggle with gambling addiction in the real world are the ones who continue playing here.
At least with Balatro there is ten hours worth of game before your reach this point.
People win streak gold stake Balatro, A20H slay the spire, unfair slice and dice, and plenty of other games in this category. Nothing wrong with playing a game for 10 hours and being done with it but calling them rng fiestas just because you can’t beat the game on the hardest difficulty every time after 10 hours is a bit dismissive of the level of effort that is put in to getting these games as tightly tuned as they are.
I'm not GP, but I thought I'd weigh in given I basically started this thread. I watch Balatro University who has the longest gold stake streak in Balatro, and while I respect that, I don't think that counters the point that the genre is heavily dependent on RNG. Winning isn't fun by default, and neither is losing boring. But you can win in ways that are boring (e.g. by getting a "broken" start and crushing through all stages) and lose in ways that are boring (e.g. by getting terrible rng that makes each round a slog until you finally lose.) With a rogue{like, lite} you are always at the mercy of RNG to see which of the {win, lose} x {fun, boring} combos you're in for, which when you're busy and have limited time to play games is extremely discouraging.
Hades is fun because there is some skill involved with the button mashing to go with the RNG, but it feels like too many games are just dressed up gambling mechanics these days. Balatro is too naked and bare with being clever gambling, plus all the ding ding ding slot machine dopamine special effects.
Hades relies too heavily on meta progression. You are supposed to grind before winning. The game is not balanced around your original state. I personally hate that because I view it as the game wasting my time but I can understand how it’s supposed to be enjoyable.
Balatro has a different issue for me. Despite having a lot of joker it sometimes feels very RNG reliant and limited once you reach high stakes. Plus the difficulty rises somehow artificially by withdrawing options rather than expending the challenge.
Slay the Spire remains unbeatable for me. No other game has the same level of complexity. You get all the tool to limit variance but every choice becomes very significant.
I don’t know how to understand your comment. The goal of Slay the Spire is to climb all the way to the heart while picking cards and beating it, preferably on A20 - all the other difficulty levels being basically a tutorial leading to the real game. There is no moment involving all the players of the world and the game is generally very slow so I’m a bit lost.
I swear I remember that when you get to the heart, you get to see something like "you need [huge number] of total damage, damage that has been applied [medium number gets increased by your measly tiny damage]" or maybe "health left [huge non-round number gets decreased by very little]" and then your character dies
I just assumed that it's some online thing where it counts total damage from everyone to finally slay that heart "together"
You get your score shown as damage once you beat the act 3 boss(es) and then go on to act 4 to fight the final boss if you properly collected the three keys which unlock it while climbing.
One common mantra about most roguelites is that every run can be a successful run if you play your cards right. Some will be harder, in others you’ll become unstoppable, but the general idea is that once you get good enough you should be able to win runs. I’m not sure if this holds and is extremely dependent on how balanced the game is, but I think it’s a sane way to approach the genre since it pushes you to improve and generally becomes a rule once you become good enough at some of the games.
One of the key differences between rogue lites and rogue likes is meta progression. In most roguelites you're able to unlock things and get more powerful for future runs. In roguelikes you always have the same starting rng. I definitely agree with you that it's all up to the game to balance the progression through both unlocks and skill improvement so it's not entirely rng. But I also don't think many put much effort into "every run is solvable". Especially for roguelikes.
I'd say it's even worse for roguelites. They tend to balanced assuming the player has done some or most of the meta-progression. Sometimes to the point where it feels the game forces you to lose to experience more of it. (I really liked inscryption up until it forced me to fail 2-3 times because I progressed too much)
With roguelikes at least you are at the intended power level every time, even if some of these games are too RNG reliant.
With real roguelikes (aka games on a grid with turn-based combat), I believe they're not designed to be fair at all. There's so much rng involved, so you will get unexpected and unfair deaths and lots of them.
Roguelike community has a saying - "losing is fun". And while I only played a few traditional rl games and finished none of them, I had great experience while constantly "losing" only a few hours into the run.
In most roguelites I play, losing isn't fun - it's frustrating. There is often very little variety in earlier stages of the game, so if you're bad (and I am) you're stuck replaying the same section for hours, only to get good RNG, go 1 level farther and immediately die to some new mechanic or difficulty spike.
One exception is The Binding Of Isaac, this is probably the best roguelite game I've ever played and nothing comes even close.
There is fair and then there is "fair". I do think most rougelikes spend at least some time on making sure the the default path is usually workable. I think roguelites fall into the trap of relying on meta-progression to push in-game progression too much. Some of the card roguelites I play feel impossible to "win" without meta progression. And in some it feels like they mostly expand complexity. It's a difficult thing to balance. I'm mostly okay with the difficulty spikes because they usually accompany power spikes that you can get with the right choices and rng. I really like the "breaking the game" aspect of roguelites like Balatro. Getting mathematical notation for high scores hits different, even though it's not necessary for beating the normal levels.
Having played both of these games I agree that Lorelei stands out as a sort of foil for blue prince. And my opinion is that that is a huge endorsement of blue prince. Lorelei’s puzzles felt so inelegant and largely detached from the ideas being explored. Felt like a logic puzzle book, with some esoteric story stuff on top that just did not keep me interested.
Blue prince’s rng is quite well thought out imo. Once you pick up on some of the unwritten rules about the room drafting system and start building strategies around what to prioritize and how to adjust your goals, it starts feeling a lot like many other popular card-based strategy games.
There are weak points, for sure, and your contrasting it with Lorelei makes sense. But Lorelei’s puzzles felt so plain and unchallenging. I like that blue prince is keeping me on my toes.
Lorelei is pretty great in its atmosphere, though the puzzles can be quite disappointing. 80% of the time the solution is "you're overthinking it, it's a number written down somewhere"
Still, I 100%-ed and enjoyed it. Also a shameless plug: I made a mod that tweaks controls to add a back button, a map button, and to allow code locks to spin in both directions
I've played for about an hour and agree with your assessment. I still have it installed but I doubt I will revisit it.
I've switched to South of Midnight and it's amazing. Not everyone's type of game - and certainly not a puzzle game - but the graphics, music, story, and gameplay combine to make it one of the best games I've played in a long, long time.
I'm eager to play more, but this is something that was a worry already an hour in. The logic puzzle I did was good enough and seems like it can be generated procedurally well enough, the "math" puzzle I did wasn't. There's more than that, right?
> and some clues that I can only experiment with if the RNG deems me worthy.
And on top of that, it's hard to know if those clues actually will matter in other runs. I found a safe code in one run. If it takes three runs before the RNG decides the room with the safe will be there, will the code be randomized? I've been trying to avoid spoilers so it's hard to know what matters.
I was also sad to hear about how much RNG is in the game, that is a detractor to what seems like a well put together experience otherwise. If you wanted to give something else a try, and have a PC, I made a first-person puzzle game that's (hopefully) more akin to Antichamber and the puzzle bits of Outer Wilds, called Chroma Zero. There's a demo on steam if you just want to dip your toe in. https://store.steampowered.com/app/3121470/Chroma_Zero/
OP here: I can see how that would be frustrating and I do touch on that in my piece. It’s not my job to convince you that you should like it, but I would say that the mystery and atmosphere and sense of discovery is what pulled me through the first hours where I wasn’t sure what was going on. If those things don’t chime with you, it can be a slog. What I’ve told other people is that it’s better not to view the game as a race but more a place to explore.
I'm about 8 hours in and really enjoying it, but I feel like I can see this in my future. For now I have so many puzzles/threads going that even if one doesn't work on a run because of RNG I'm still making progress somewhere else, but I could see that drying up a bit as I solve more things and want to focus on something specific.
The puzzles for resources you mention are by far the worst part for me. I really wish there were a way to say "I get it, I know how to solve simple logic puzzles and do basic arithmetic, just give me the stuff".
Same experience after 8 hours. I can see how roguelite fans would enjoy the dopamine hits of new information / upgrades / solving tiny bits of puzzles. As a pure puzzle fan I found the roguelite stuff repetitive and boring, and the puzzle stuff itself is good but not mindblowingly good. (Yes - even the less obvious puzzles)
I had my doubts when people were playing 100+ hours of it. That gave me the idea it would be a skinner box type game that is addictive but empty. So far nothing has changed my opinion on that.
As someone who just rolled credits on Blue Prince after 20 hours or so, I can definitely confirm that there’s much much more to the post-game content than a skinner box. It’s much more like a mega puzzle hunt[1] with an RNGish roguelike wrapper.
> many times where the game decided to give me nothing but rooms leading to dead ends
Since each room can only appear once, you can minimize this by strategically choosing to place dead end rooms early on in the lower southeast/southwest, and edges generally. Then always make sure you have gems as you move north, so you can usually pick good rooms.
Also, there's a great book on drafting that you can find at the Library (of course you need to draw the Library twice, one to request the book and one more to get it - another issue with the RNG)
I long for the day when people have tired of roguelites and stops putting roguelite elements in every. single. game. of. every. genre.
But hey, it makes you get away with reusing the little content you made ad nauseam and procedurally tweak some numbers on top of it to fake progression.
Loop Hero was probably when I nope'd out forever, but at least that game was pure and honest.
I disagree. The game is not meant to be played looking for one specific item/room. It drip-feeds you clues and progress. Every run pretty much I get something that helps. If you’re beelining for just one thing it doesn’t really work.
Also, for your example, I think you missed that you get a major permanent bonus when you got the room after using the other room.
OP here: Is there anything that makes you say that other than the fact that it’s positive and I received a review key? I’ve written about plenty of games I didn’t enjoy that I got for free (e.g. for judging awards) including games that were very well-received, like Viewfinder and Pacific Drive.
Posting a review for an arbitrary game to HN definitely smells like advertising to me. I don’t think you would be posting an article like this to HN that shat on a relatively unknown indie game you didn’t like.
How is this _not_ advertising in your mind? Surely you don’t think random people on HN are invested in your take on this game. What purpose did you intend if not to promote the newly released game?
I feel you’re trying to say you weren’t paid to advertise this game, which I believe, but it is 100% what you’re doing.
I do think random people are invested in my take on this game, yes. If they weren't, it wouldn't have been upvoted. It's actually very difficult to get links on the front page of HN, the signal to noise is quite high.
I post around a third to a half of the articles I write on my blog to HN – the ones I think people here will like. Sometimes they hit and sometimes they don't. Three weeks ago I wrote about Odysseus, a very ambitious larp, that was popular here:
I think you are saying that anyone posting a positive article about something you don't know about on HN is a shill, which seems quite strange. Sometimes people genuinely like things and want to share their thoughts on why.
My final note is that Blue Prince is not a relatively unknown indie game. It was included for free on PS Plus and Xbox Game Pass at launch – quite unusual. It was also previewed by quite a few publications and is almost certainly going to be shortlisted in a lot of game of the year lists.
And to be clear, I have not been paid to write this article. There are no incentives involved whatsoever.
What I’m saying is that it doesn’t feel obvious that I should definitely believe you. You are unambiguously promoting this newly released game. By doing this a savvy reader does need to question whether or not you’re a shill. And that is tiring. It is fully possible that this article is intended to manipulate.
Maybe background info on your past activities can provide evidence to reinforce the idea that you are doing this only because you want to. But I’m not really interested in researching you. Content like this is just not easily readable with blind trust.
A lot of people do this, no? It doesn't seem more offensive than any of the other handful of self-submissions per day; certainly it's less so to me than all those tech blog posts by companies. Also Blue Prince is a puzzly, escape-roomy game that's one of the highest-profile indie releases this year, so probably more in tune with HN's taste than most games.
I like that a link aggregator serves to surface things that people don't necessarily have investment in. I thought the article was well-written and I'm more interested now in what he has to say in future. (I guess the advertising worked...)
Do a lot of people do this? I don’t actually feel like this happens much here.
Idk. I feel it has a bad smell to be doing this at a game’s release with a review copy.
Again I’m willing to believe in good faith that there aren’t behind the scenes incentives here. But it would feel a lot more genuine to drop this at least a few months later imo. It _feels_ like advertising.
And frankly the juxtaposition of the glowing tone and then negative comments here has really thrown me about the whole thing. Whereas before I would just say it’s a difference of opinion, now there’s a question of intent to deceive. Meh.
That makes sense. The juxtaposition isn't just OP, though: Blue Prince is an extremely highly-rated game by critics (https://www.metacritic.com/game/blue-prince/critic-reviews/), and will likely be one of the three highest-rated games this year, but has 80% positive reviews on Steam at time of writing, which is very low. On Steam it isn't even in the top 3 on its single day of release.
I'm not exactly sure what leads to such a dramatic disconnect. Maybe game reviewers just value different things than the general population.
Game reviewers don't spend as long with a game as regular players. They play enough hours until they feel like they have a good enough handle on the game to write the review.
A game which maintains a high level of engagement during that review period but which drops off not long after that could show this kind of discrepancy between customers and reviewers. I don't want to suggest that Blue Prince is this sort of game (never mind that it might be deliberate) but I think it's possible for some games to have been designed for game reviewers rather than for long-term players. The top HN comment on this story (as I write this) would seem to indicate that the game has an issue with running out of steam after a few hours.
This sort of thing is not unheard of in other media as well. In the film industry this strategy is called Oscar-bait. Of course for a film it's not based on duration but subject matter. Certain themes and filmmaking techniques have been accused of being targeted at the narrower interests of the Academy rather than a broad audience.
Many of the people reviewing the game highly (at well-regarded publications) have spoken about playing the game for tens of hours, some mentioning 100h+.
I thought it was a well written and entertaining review. While I’m probably not going to buy the game, I think what the author wrote, and this discussion here is important for discovering games I might be interested in.
FWIW Adrian Hon (the writer) is easily the game reviewer that I trust the most! I am quite sensitive to false positives with games - it really sucks to spend a few hours on a game that you drop - and my false positive rate with his reviews is very low.
(I have no affiliation with this post beyond being a fan of Adrian's writing and work + haven't played Blue Prince yet, although I'm very likely to play it because of this review)
You paid $30 for it. Did you get $30 worth of entertainment from it? $3/hr sounds pretty good, and if all it did was not live up to your expectations because of what other people been saying, I'd say that's still money well spent, just you gotta adjust how much stock you put into what those particular people say as relates to good you enjoy something.
For me, a dead end after 10 hours of playing feels like frustration. I don't like starting games I can't finish, especially if I rage quit. It stays with me as a painful memory, the opposite of entertainment.
When I bought the original Brothers, it took me maybe 10 hours to finish, if even that. It was well worth the cost, amazing game. (Apparently the remake was badly done...)
Some games are in the "experience" category, $30 for 10 amazing hours, great deal. $30 for 10 hours and then a rage quit, not a good deal.
While I still mainly use Google to search for terms online, I am increasingly using the free version of Perplexity for more advanced topics or general questions.
Perplexity is an LLM like Claude and ChatGPT, but instead of relying on the data it's been trained on, Perplexity gathers a whole bunch of sources (websites, youtube video transcripts, etc.) related to your query, and then uses the contents of those sources to generate an answer.
So while it may not be as smart as Claude or ChatGPT on certain topics, it does seem to hallucinate a whole lot less.
And at times when I'm not given the answer I'm looking for, or when I want to make sure it's not making things up, I simply browse the list of sources it used to generate its answer.
I personally believe the reason for non-western fiction gaining so much mainstream traction is quite simple: it provides a perspective almost entirely seperated from the reality most people face.
Even simple scenarios, like running a small store or living life in a rural village, are so different from our usual experiences that it provides a way for our brains to release some of the pressure that comes from our busy day-to-day lives.
The "isekai" genre (being transported to a different world, usually after dying an unfortune death) is an extreme take on this, where almost all connection to reality is removed entirely.
Compare those stories to most (not all) modern mainstream western fiction, and you'll find that a lot of it tends to take place within our existing world instead.
I was putting a lot of thought into this just yesterday, talking with some friends about the "Thing: Japan" phenomenon
It's important to recognize that any discussion about Japanese media outside of Japan is more or less only receiving the media that Japan is exporting to the world. Yes there are exceptions to this, people going out of their way to fan sub shows and such, but for the majority of Western people who are experiencing Japanese media it is very mainstream popular stuff like Studio Ghibli films and the most popular anime
With that said, I think the approach Japan has towards making media is very different than Western studios, especially when it comes to depictions of real world Japan
American TV and writing is very cynical about America. Consider the common depictions of rural America in most American media (rednecks, racist, boring, dirty) to the common depictions of rural Japan in Japanese media (idyllic, colorful, spiritual, friendly)
Even compare how a fictional Japanese city is depicted in the Yakuza game series (where you play a criminal doing crimes) and how a fictional American city is depicted in the Grand Theft Auto series (where you play a criminal doing crimes)
I really think Japanese creators like Japan more than American creators like America, and it shows through their work by smoothing over a lot of the rough edges of Japanese society
> Yes there are exceptions to this, people going out of their way to fan sub shows and such,
I agree that the well known works are usually the better productions, but that detail is wrong. Crunchyroll puts out almost everything that's currently being released, including complete nonsense like reincarnated as a vending machine
And while I'd agree that most Japanese authors seem to have gigantic pride for their culture, it does get old because it's become such a trope to introduce Japanese culture/food as the best thing ever created...
I mean I'm more likely to watch an anime then the woke garbage the west is currently producing, but I think the main reason is because our own productions have so massively dropped in quality.
There just hasn't been another series such as Dexter, Breaking Bad etc in over 10 yrs now... If there were, I think anime would be a lot less relevant right now.
> I agree that the well known works are usually the better productions, but that detail is wrong. Crunchyroll puts out almost everything that's currently being released
Japan produces a lot more media than just anime, the west does not see most of it. When was the last time you saw a live action Japanese procedural crime show localized to English? Or really any live action Japanese shows that aren't something like Kamen Rider or Godzilla?
Also, arguably the only reason Crunchyroll even exists today is because of dedicated fan subs making Japanese media available for decades
That's true, my mind just instantly jumped to anime because of the word fansub.
I think most people would also agree that anime, manga (and games as a distant third) are the main cultural exports of Japan, while life action movies/series are often centered around American productions
"It's important to recognize that any discussion about Japanese media outside of Japan is more or less only receiving the media that Japan is exporting to the world"
Which is a really just a long winded way of saying "The majority Japanese media we are exposed to is anime, manga and games"
Biggest reason is simply quantity, Japan churns out hundreds of animated stories from new authors every year, the west do barely anything in comparison.
When you create that much content some of them do become hits, and it also encourages more authors to create more content, while western studios only invests in franchises they can control themselves to create another marvel, while Japan just churns out content while the authors retain the rights.
Edit: Many western authors writes about other worlds etc, they just don't get anything animated since it is so hard to get anyone to invest in your story.
There seems to be some progress in the western animation scene. Dungeon Crawler Carl and Cradle are both getting animated adaptations.
The biggest tragedy is that even incredibly popular authors like Brandon Sanderson don't get a chance of having their own animated series. Mistborn would work perfectly as an anime adaptation.
Marvel and DC historically created way too much consolidation which really limited creative output. And by this point people seem pretty fed up with 'capeshit'. Western comics are also incredibly hostile towards new readers, especially when compared to managa where you can just pick up the story and binge read the whole thing without having to pick up a million other things.
>Western comics are also incredibly hostile towards new readers
I agree with this if we are talking American superhero comics, but the European scene is decidedly different. Franco-Belgian comics are usually very pick-up-and-go, as are a great many of the homegrown UK ones. I think we're coming off a decade-ish where the massive investment in Marvel/DC 'verses have been eating up all the oxygen in the room for large comic book adaptions. Or just for general public consciousness attention for comics.
I am pretty confident that it's gonna turn around, but it might take a while on the large scale projects.
Things have definitely come a long way since the nineties where you would read a book or comic and wonder about how great it will be when the property will get adapted and reach a wider audience. It's kind of like listening to a band before they became popular or maybe rain on Arrakis. We got what we wanted and the thing that we anticipated isn't nearly as special anymore. Dinniman and Brandon Sanderson definitely deserve their wider audiences but it just seems anticlimactic as these shows and movies inevitably roll out.
Just a handful of Western comics you can pick up and read today:
The Sandman (Netflix show), The Best We Could Do, Pride of Baghdad, Superman American Alien, Superman Red Son (animated), I Hate Fairyland, Bone, Epileptic, Paper Girls (turned into an live action show), Monstress, Saga, The Watchmen (turned into a terrible movie, an adaptation show, and an animated show), Stumptown (also got a show I believe), Daytripper, Maus, Berlin…
America is not the whole West, HN readers often forget it. Ditto with thinking on "Dragon Ball in the West" ended in the 00's when we the Europead finished it on mid 90's and began to watch Dragon Ball GT in 1999.
Western comics are also incredibly hostile towards new readers
In my experience, it is easy to just pick up a trade paperback, one shot, subscribe to a limited series, etc. Even if you want to just jump in to an ongoing series, the writing and storylines are simple enough that you can usually pick it up in a few issues or just wait for a new arc.
I'm not at all involved in the industry so here's an armchair opinion; western animation is too expensive for anything but guaranteed hits or kid's shows. Arcane is one of the best western animations of today, but it cost $250 million for just two seasons.
Wages in Japan for animators are much lower, if not exploitative.
The Cradle adaptation is only an animatic, sadly. Best case scenario is that it generates enough buzz for a Netflix or an Amazon to pick it up for a full series, but then I'd be worried it would get butchered like Rings of Power or Wheel of Time have been.
None of the japanese literature in this article is being adapted into animation, we're talking about literary fiction here as opposed to more pop fiction like light novels which exist more as mass commercial enterprises.
No, I don't think somebody getting into Re-Zero is going to start reading VNs like Umineko someday, let alone progress to literature, in the same way as how somebody watching the MCU is unlikely to progress to Infinite Jest.
Geographical distinctions don't really make sense in deciding preference, you start with genre elements and pick from there, regardless if it's Western or Japanese. Ignoring a work because it comes from X country would just be bizarre. As a sci-fi or fantasy fan I don't make distinctions between Japanese or Korean or Western works, nor do I see other fans doing so. For example, I wouldn't be comparing Satoshi Hase's Beatless in the context of "Japanese" works, I'd be comparing it to other AI works. The only limiting factor is translation.
But cross-genre pollination doesn't really happen nowadays, most shounen readers will never go or even avoid mecha, and so forth. Otaku culture especially is much more fragmented today than in the early 2010s.
> No, I don't think somebody getting into Re-Zero is going to start reading VNs like Umineko someday
You realize Umeniko got an anime? Yes, some of the people who watched that anime probably went to read the books, is that really so hard to believe? Authors who got their works animated see a lot more book sales as well. Then as they read those books they might want more so they look for adjacent books, fueling the entire industry.
Well, the Umineko anime was pretty bad... But I illustrated the disprecancy between the VN culture and larger Anime culture for reason that the VN subculture is already very close to Anime subculture yet receives much less attention. Of course a few individuals can "graduate", but we can observe statistically most don't. Majority of AoT fans aren't going into MuvLuv.
Contemporary Literary Fiction as in the article is separated by far more cultural layers, there is virtually no cross pollination with the otaku subculture. You are far more likely to get someone who reads Westen literature to expand to Japanese works than an otaku to do so.
No, not all start as light novels. In many cases the light novels come afterwards as a way to capitalise (eg Demon Slayer, the manga finished a while ago, so while the anime is still running light novels are coming out).
Apothecary Diaries started as a light novel, but JJK, AoT and many others start as Manga
Also, the article is about animes as well. Makato Shinkai’s She and Her Cat is an anime, not a book, for example. It talks a lot about books, but it isn't only about books. I thought that was obvious.
> No, not all start as light novels
Many are though, many of the animes that came out for a few years I had already read the LN for. That so many novels becomes animes is likely a big reason why there are so many novels being written along those styles.
> The "isekai" genre (being transported to a different world, usually after dying an unfortune death) is an extreme take on this, where almost all connection to reality is removed entirely.
> Compare those stories to most (not all) modern mainstream western fiction, and you'll find that a lot of it tends to take place within our existing world instead
When people draw conclusions like this it often seems like they're making apples to oranges comparisons. Most "isekai" stuff is light novels. The appropriate comparison with stuff published in the US would might be YA books which also have lots of stuff that does not "take place within our existing world".
I think there might be some confusion about how common different types of fiction are in Japan because people are comparing US literary fiction with Japanese genre fiction because Japanese "pure literature" fiction doesn't tend to receive attention in the US, but in reality I'm not sure the US and Japanese fiction markets are that different overall.
This article is directly talking about Japanese pure literature, I think some posters just took off from the title only?
You're right that if we are comparing the wider body, there isn't really a distinction between "Western" or "Japanese", at least for enthusiasts, what matters alot more are the individual authors.
Literary fiction is a genre with tropes of its own. It's just one that its fans get extremely snobby about. But doesn't Murakami count as literary fiction?
There's a ton of great western fiction that does the same thing, it's just not usually gonna show up on traditional channels. Heck, that's not even entirely true since Travis Baldree's slice of life Legends & Lattes won Nebula and Hugo awards last year.
If you go on Royal Road there's tons of great fantasy stories. The West is just missing the Japanaese pipeline of web serials -> light novel -> manga -> anime -> live action movie. Although there's companies like WebToons that seem to be trying to get such a pipeline going by making comics based on popular western web serials.
I've read my fair share of both Western and Japanese light novels, and you can definitely find quality content everywhere. In Japan they just do a better job at capitalizing on success by giving every slightly popular light novel series a try with an anime season or two. As someone who usually checks out 1 or 2 episodes of most seasonal anime, I can tell you that most of it ends up being barely memorable slop though.
It's worth noting that the West seems to be catching up, a few popular series are getting animated series. Two big ones that come to mind are Cradle by Will Wight, and Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman.
I think there are also issues of scale of investment and revenue splits - I can't find right now, but there was a rant tweet from a Japanese comic author that apparent typical compensation for webtoons was below labor cost of his team by couple digits, and I also remember seeing similar rants on topic of AI training materials that were off by even larger magnitudes(like $.25 per dozen images one-time vs $1k per use recurring).
So authors seem to be getting paid more, and that leads to an obvious question of how. One possible answer to that is maybe Japanese media contents - be it images or anime or light novel or classical novel - are still heavily subsidized by its strong and isolate domestic consumption. Average household expenditure on reading is about $120 per year in US and $325 in Japan[1], which IMO roughly coincide with this hypothesis.
If there actually is such a situation... maybe what's missing in Western media is just accelerated consumption. It's weird to think that Americans and Europeans might not be consuming enough media, but that could be it.
1: at current rate of 150 yen/dollar; raw value is 50k yen or ~1% average yearly income
A sort of joke is that many anime episodes are a 30 minute ad for the soundtrack CD. If you look at the anime by itself the numbers very clearly make no sense, but shows are financed by integrated production companies that make their money on side merchandise.
Murakami's works, at least, feel quite westernised. They are filled with references to western music and other art, the protagonists generally have jobs that are also common in the west, and (not sure whether this is down to Murakami or his translator) the characters always sound very American in dialogue. Nothing about them feels particularly alien to a western reader, except the surrealism itself (and, perhaps, certain aspects of his portrayal of women that is sometimes considered problematic in the west).
The point you make here is exactly why I often prefer to watch *anime. I think it also applies to my preferences for British period pieces.
As an American, British period pieces[0][1][2] obviously present a different world. I imagine they are more palatable to someone in my demographic because we are relatively disconnected from British culture, society, and history. Recently I became aware of the UK's New Man / New Lad gender stereotypes[3] and realized that the main characters of these shows fit. As a result of this awareness, I can no longer enjoy these shows without being reminded of cultural conflicts of the present day. A story about a social issue set in the 1960s used to be just that, but now it's more apparent to me that the narratives are meant to shape present-day perception of these issues.
It was nice not being reminded of the political struggles we face on a daily basis. Now I'm unsure if media consumers who lack this awareness are the lucky ones or the sheep. I wonder if British people have always felt this way about these shows and I'm only just catching up now. I also wonder if this dynamic is mutual with other cultures - for example, is Rings of Power considered non-controversial in SE Asia due to the cultural disconnect?
* My preference for anime has waned as certain tropes have become quite overused and tiresome.
There does seem to be a unique form of escapism in the aesthetics. I often think of it when I think about the jazz cafe phenomenon that is popular in Japan. It's warm and cozy but it can also be a cozy sterility (but hey we have cats!) that a lot of societies seem to be going through now (in the West as well). A sleepy existential crisis that plays itself out in quotidian surrealism. It's not unpleasant but also feels somehow like a miss on both an individual and civilizational level.
Video games, yes, but anime (aside from a couple things that played on normal channels, like dragon ball—seeking out more, though...) and especially manga were things only certain kinds of dorks enjoyed, among those whose high school years were in the '90s and '00s. Toward the veeeeery end of the '00s (as the kids right behind that group started reaching high school) it was changing, and what's remarkable now is how entirely normal it is, even manga. It's no longer unusual for the popular kids to like it.
It was kinda hard to even get anime in that time period, if it wasn't one of the few played on TV. Hell, even US TV shows had only recently started coming out as complete DVD sets, most still weren't available that way, and publishers were all over the place on what they thought a season was worth. You pretty much had to be into Internet piracy to be a fan, or know someone who was and would get stuff for you.
I think most attempts to rationalize why media from an entire culture is popular are going to fall short, and while this is better reasoning that usual it's still overthinking the problem. At the end of the day, every culture produces media, some percentage of that is going to be really good, and sometimes other groups end up really enjoying it because of quality and novelty.
I don't know if that was your intention, but I basically understand from your comment that black men and powerful women are two components of reality that are bothering you to start with. Yes all new British and American productions are ticking these two boxes, but it's not shouting at all of us.
I suspect for the Japanese women who are putting in perspective the extreme conservatism on gender roles prevalent in their country, most Japanese fiction shouts at them about real life too.
>I suspect for the Japanese women who are putting in perspective the extreme conservatism on gender roles prevalent in their country, most Japanese fiction shouts at them about real life too.
The 15th of each month is a big day for 36-year-old Yoshihiro Nozawa: it is the day he gets paid.
But every month, he hands over his entire salary to his wife Masami.
She controls the household budget and gives him a monthly pocket money of 30,000 yen ($381; £243). Despite being the breadwinner, that is all the money he can spend on himself over the next 30 days.
"The last five days from the 10th of each month are usually the toughest," says Yoshihiro.
[...]
47-year-old Taisaku Kubo has been getting 50,000 yen a month from his wife Yuriko for the past 15 years.
He has tried to negotiate a pay rise each year but his wife makes a presentation to explain why it cannot be done.
"She draws a pie chart of our household budget to explain why I cannot get more pocket money," says Taisaku.
[...]
So why don't men start controlling the household budgets themselves?
"I don't think many men hand over their entire salaries happily," says career consultant Takao Maekawa of FeelWorks.
"But they feel it's their obligation to earn money for the family even if it means they have to suffer themselves."
Imagine a world where literature was preoccupied with height. A character is always slotted in who's explicitly the token short character, and the storyline is always, subtly or not, written to highlight how the world is biased against short people. Authors are very cautious about depicting a short person with any negative trait; when they do, a direct line is drawn between the social circumstances they encountered and their future actions.
This would be exhausting, and people would rightly start to roll their eyes at it. And it would be fine for readers to object to it, even as short people are a component of reality. It wouldn't mean the complainant finds short people objectionable in themselves, but simply that they don't think height is a defining part of reality that all of literature is obligated to address.
> Imagine a world where literature was preoccupied with height.
Smart of you to have picked one of the few human characteristics that hasn't been used to justify discriminations and very unfortunate historical events... In our world it's not just literature that is very preoccupied with skin colour and gender.
> It wouldn't mean the complainant finds short people objectionable in themselves, but simply that they don't think height is a defining part of reality that all of literature is obligated to address.
You have it reversed, if it's not a defining part of someone's reality, why would one even care whether it's addressed in fiction or not? The person I was answering to does care, a lot, to the point that swinging one way or another can ruin their experience.
Not getting into how we define what are valid complaints vs invalid, because that's besides the point.
You'd find it exhausting. People similarly find the race and gender preoccupation exhausting. Your justification for the different treatment seems to be "for these categories, people are obligated to not find them exhausting, but not for other categories." But that's not well-motivated.
In a height-preoccupied literary world, can you imagine objecting to the height preoccupation? If you did, how could you justify it, if it's not a defining part of your existence?
"one of the few human characteristics that hasn't been used to justify discriminations"
Of course it has. That notions like “Napoleon complex” circulate in pop culture, suggests that society broadly considers short-statured people to be somehow disadvantaged and, moreover, it can be funny when the short-statured kick against the pricks. Also, the demand that a suitable male partner ought to be over six feet tall, is absolutely widespread, both in match-seeking profiles on online-dating platforms and in dating fora where women give advice to each other. (Or, if you want to reverse the sexes, Truffaut’s gag in Baisers volés about dating a tall girl, wouldn’t work if people broadly didn’t feel that there was something weird about this.)
Isn't being annoyed at something sociopolitical and expressing that feeling, sharing your concerns with anyone who will listen, itself a sociopolitical act?
Because it is.
I'm not trying to gaslight you, insofar as reason itself agrees with my proposition.
I'm not Elon Musk or Donald Trump. Sending your complaints of mainstream culture to me will not result in your political representation and its voice being heard. I am unable to effectively sponsor and defend your proposed alternative dynamics.
But! If I am like a techno-angel sent from the Heavens above, then what I can do is suggest to you that exit, as opposed to voice, is a sociopolitical act that you should consider. Exit from the mainstream culture is your best bet.
The token characters and checkboxes are a symptom of design-by-committee corporate culture anyways and even without them, the quality isn't going to be any better because again, it's corporate slop.
This only means that there's a pervasive cultural synagogue/cathedral that has infected behavior through pedagogical means. Namely, education itself has been made to serve the interests of all possible economics that can occur within the borders of global liberal democracy.
This also only means that any sociopolitical exit from the zombie invasion must at least be as high as considering a departure from common epistemology.
I choose not to watch most American-made entertainment because I share this sentiment, however, I'd like to point out that it goes much deeper than that. All media is a construction and projection of a certain viewpoint on reality. Until American entertainment can project a view that is wholesome, I must always consider it to be less valuable than media that does. This is not only for entertainment's sake, but also for the mental health of viewers. We need shows to show people how to be polite and how to behave, not shows that denigrate and debase. We should all put less emphasis on shows that align with political views and more emphasis on shows that align with moral ones.
That almost all my comments here got flagged says a lot about how putrid our society (and the specific subset most of HN's audience hails from) is. Sad, really.
That is about as uneducated a take as one could possibly have.
Keep in mind "isekai" as a genre also exists in western entertainment; A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court and The Chronicles of Narnia are some prominent and famous examples. Are those specifically for shut-ins and nerds too?
Sorry if I struck a nerve, I was being slightly hyperbolic, but why do you think I'm uneducated? I also should have said I was specifically referring to anime since I think that's what most people think of when they hear "isekai".
When we talk about isekai in modern contexts we do commonly refer to the post 2015 Narou-Isekai where one certainly draws a distinction between isekai before 2015 or after.
The thing about "old" isekai is that they exist more as fantasy stories with specific messages and themes, where Narou-Isekai can be specifically placed in the context of the latest evolution of the Otaku after the failure of sekai-kei and the increasing self-indulgence from CGCDT, Battle-Harems all the way to Isekai.
> the whole fucking point of leisure activities is to escape from the hellscape that is life and reality
To claim that escapism is the sole purpose of art is certainly a bold statement. Why bother reflecting on human society when we can just do our best to jam our fingers in our ears and ignore it?
I value entertainment that demonstrates how to thrive more than "entertainment" that demonstrates struggle. Struggle is important and necessary, but it should never be an end unto itself. True entertainment should uphold the dignity of as many people as possible.
If capitalism wasn't the leviathan that it was, then I wouldn't blame anyone for trying to escape the life that capitalist neo-colonialism has brought into existence. Pretty soon, at this rate, life itself will be a subordinate of the democratic global capital project.
For comics, I believe this partially originates from Stan Lee's view of including something relatable from real life in their works of art and media. The problem with that view is that it doesn't really integrate into all forms of media well.
And I don't know if Japanese entertainment would fall over that easy. Media has a way of sticking around in our heads.
"the whole fucking point of leisure activities is to escape from the hellscape that is life and reality"
I get that you don’t like woke, but that is too blanket a claim. There has just been too much popular literature across America and Europe that has directly dealt with dire social and political trends of the day. Even when it comes to the issue of American race relations and the impact of slavery, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom’s Cabin was one of the all-time bestselling books of the 19th century, so fiction readers clearly weren’t interested only in escape.
This take is in the "Why did they put politics into my Metal Gear?!" category. Japanese fiction continues to win over people precisely because it's more than just pure entertainment. Japanese creators still manage to challenge audiences intellectually, politically, even aesthetically. Metaphor: ReFantazio, probably one of the best Japanese game releases this year is very political, not shying away at all from tackling class, race and even the literal point of this post, media dumbed down to escapism.
Maybe you don't realize it, but we're on the same side.
Japanese entertainment isn't In Your Dumb Face about things unlike western entertainment, it respects your intelligence and sheer common sense. You're not being talked down to, your ability to just pick another (better) product to be entertained with and walk away is respected; and it's an escape from the rest of the world shouting at you about something.
The author states that AI safety is very important, that many experts think it is very important and that even governments consider it to be very important, but there is no mention of why it is important or what "safe" AI even looks like.
Am I that out of the loop that what this concept entails is so obvious that it doesn't require an explanation, or am I overlooking something here?
The idea that most AIs are unsafe to non-AI interests is foundational to the field and typically called instrumental convergence [1]. You can also look up the term "paperclip maximizer" to find some concrete examples of what people fear.
It's unfortunately hard to describe what a safe AI would look like, although many have tried. Similar to mathematics, knowing what the correct equation looks like is a huge advantage in building the proof needed to arrive at it, so this has never bothered me much.
You can see echoes of instrumental convergence in your everyday life if you look hard enough. Most of us have wildly varying goals, but for most of those goals, money is a useful way to achieve them -- at least up to a point. That's convergence. An AI would probably get a lot farther by making a lot of money too, no matter what the goal is.
Where this metaphor breaks down is we human beings often arrive at a natural satiety point with chasing our goals: We can't just surf all day, we eventually want to sleep or eat or go paddle boarding instead. A surfing AI would have no such limiters, and might do such catastrophic things as use its vast wealth to redirect the world's energy supplies to create the biggest Kahuna waves possible to max out its arbitrarily assigned SurfScore.
We flatten mountains to get at the rocks under them. We fly far above the clouds to reach our holiday destinations.
We have in our pockets devices made from metal purified out of sand, lightly poisoned, covered in arcane glyphs that so small they can never be seen by our eyes and so numerous that you would die of old age before being able to count them all, which are used to signal across the world in the blink of an eye (never mind (Shakespeare's) Puck's boast of putting a girdle around the earth in 40 minutes, the one we actually build and placed across the oceans sends information around it in 400 milliseconds), used to search through libraries grander than any from the time when Zeus was worshiped, and used to invent new images and words from prompts alone.
We power our sufficiently advanced technology with condensed sunlight and wind, and with the primordial energies bound into rocks and tides; and we have put new πλανῆται (planētai, "wandering" star) in the heavens to do the job of the god Mercurius better than he ever could in any myth or legend. And those homes themselves are made from νέος λίθος ("neolithic", new rock).
We've seen the moon from the far side, both in person and by גּוֹלֶם (golem, for what else are our mechanised servants?); and likewise to the bottom of the ocean, deep enough that スサノオ (Susanoo, god of sea and storms) could not cast harm our way; we have passed the need for prayer to Τηθύς (Tethys) for fresh water as we can purify the oceans; and Ἄρης (Ares) would tremble before us as we have made individual weapons powered by the same process that gives the sun its light and warmth that can devastate areas larger than some of the entire kingdoms of old.
By the same means do our homes, our pockets, have within them small works of artifice that act as húsvættir (house spirits) that bring us light and music whenever we simply ask for them, and stop when we ask them to stop.
We've cured (some forms of) blindness, deafness, lameness; we have cured leprosy and the plague; we have utterly eliminated smallpox, the disease for which शीतला (Seetla, Hindu goddess for curing various things) is most directly linked; we can take someone's heart out and put a new one in without them dying — if Sekhmet (Egyptian goddess of medicine) or Ninkarrak (Mesopotamian, ditto) could do that, I've not heard the tales; we have scanners which look inside the body without the need to cut, and some which can even give a rough idea of what images the subjects are imagining.
"We are close to gods, and on the far side", as Banks put it.
Wonderfully written, and though I've seen this kind of reshaping of perspective on our human achievements in the modern world before, you've done it exceptionally well here.
The article itself is talking about a specific book. "Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies" by Nick Bostrom. That book is the seminal work on the subject of AI safety. If you honestly want answers to your questions I recommend reading it. It is written in a very accessible way.
If reading a whole book is out of question then I'm sure you can find many abridged versions of it. In fact the article itself provides some pointers at the very end of it.
> Am I that out of the loop
Maybe? Kinda? That's the point of the article. There has been 10 years since the publication of the book. During that time the topic went from the weird interest of some Oxford philosopher to a mainstream topic discussed widely. 10 years is both a long time and a blink of an eye. Depending on your frame of reference. But it is never too late to get in the loop if you want to.
At the same time I don't think it is fair to expect from every article ever to rehash the basic concepts of the field they are working on.
Many have expressed my sentiments far better than I can, but Superintelligence is quite frankly written in a very tedious way. He says in around 300 pages what should have been an essay.
I also found some of his arguments laughably bad. He mentions that AI might create a world of a handful of trillionaires, but doesn’t seem to see this extreme inequality as an issue or existential threat in and of itself.
Ok? I don't see the contradiction. When I say "It is written in a very accessible way" I mean to say "you will understand it". Even if you don't have years of philosophy education. Which is sadly not a given in this day and age. "frankly written in a very tedious way" seems to be talking about how much fun you will have while reading it. That is an orthogonal concern.
> He says in around 300 pages what should have been an essay.
Looking forward to your essay.
> I also found some of his arguments laughably bad.
Didn't say that I agree with everything written in it. But if you want to understand what the heck people mean by AI safety, and why they think it is important then it has the answers.
> He mentions that AI might create a world of a handful of trillionaires, but doesn’t seem to see this extreme inequality as an issue or existential threat in and of itself.
So wait. Is your problem that the argument is bad, or that it doesn't cover everything? I'm sure your essay will do a better job.
> He mentions that AI might create a world of a handful of trillionaires, but doesn’t seem to see this extreme inequality as an issue or existential threat in and of itself.
I've not read the book, so I don't know the full scope of that statement.
In isolation, that's not a big issue and not an existential threat, as it depends on the details.
For example, a handful of trillionaires where everyone else is "merely" as rich as Elon Musk isn't a major inequality, it's one where everyone's mid-life crisis looks e.g. like whichever sci-fi spaceship or fantasy castle they remember fondly from childhood.
Haven't read the book either, but a handful of trillionaires could be that the "upper 10 000" oligarchs of the USA get to be those trillionaires, and everyone else starves to death or simply can't afford to have children and a few decades later dies from old age.
Right now, in order to grow and thrive, economies need educated people to run it, and in order to get people educated you need to give them some level of wealth to have their lower level needs met.
It's a win-win situation. Poor/starving people go to arms more quickly and destabilize economies. Educated people are the engineers, doctors and nurses. But once human labour isn't needed any more, there is no need for those people any more either.
So AI allows you to deal with poor people much better now than in the past: an AI army helps to prevent revolutions and AI engineers, doctors, mechanics, etc, eliminate the need for educated people.
There is the economic effect that consumption drives economic growth, which is a real effect that has powered the industrial revolution and given wealth to some of today's rich people. Of course, a landlord has the incentive for people to live in his house, that's what gives it value. Same goes for a farmer, he wants people to eat his food.
But there is already a certain chunk of the economy which only caters to the super rich, say the yacht construction industry. If this chunk keeps on growing while the 99% get less and less purchasing power, and the rich eventually transition their assets into that industry, they get less and less incentives to keep the bottom 99% fed/around.
I'm not saying this is going to happen, but it's entirely possible to happen. It's also possible that every individual human will be incredibly wealthy compared to today (in many ways, the millions in the middle classes in the west today live better than kings a thousand years ago).
In the end, it will depend on human decisions which kinds of post-AI societies we will be building.
Indeed, I was only giving the "it can be fine" example to illustrate an alternative to "it must be bad".
As it happens, I am rather concerned about how we get from here to there, as in the middle there's likely a point where we have some AI that's human-level at ability, which needs 1 kW to do in 1 hour what a human would do in 1 hour, and at current electricity prices that's something humans have to go down to the UN abject poverty threshold to be cost-competitive with while simultaneously being four times the current global per-capita electricity supply which would drive up prices until some balance was reached.
But that balance point is in the form of electricity being much more expensive, and a lot of people no longer being able to afford to use it at all.
It's the traditional (not current) left vs. right split — rising tides lifting all boats vs. boats being the status symbol to prove you're an elite and letting the rest drown — we may get well-off people who task their robots and AI to make more so the poor can be well-off, or we may have exactly as you describe.
Or imagine if AI provides access to extending life and youth indefinitely, but that doing so costs about 1% of the GDP of the US to do.
Combine that with a small ruling class haveing captured all political power through a fully robotic police/military force capable of suppressing any human rebellion.
I don't find it difficult to imagine a clique of 50 people or so sacrificing the welfere of the rest of the population to personally be able to live a life in ultimate luxery and AI generated bliss that lasts "forever". They will probably even find a way to frame it as the noble and moral thing to do.
What does AI, or even post-singularity robots do for the 50 richest people? They already live like it's post-singularity. They have the resources to pay people to do everything for them, and not just cooking and cleaning, but driving and organizing and managing pet projects while they pursue art careers.
> Or imagine if AI provides access to extending life and youth indefinitely, but that doing so costs about 1% of the GDP of the US to do.
That's a bad example even if you meant 1% of current USA GDP per person getting the treatment (i.e. 200 bn/person/year), because an AI capable of displacing human labour makes it very easy to supply that kind of wealth to everyone.
That level is what I suggested earlier, with the possibility of a world where everyone not in the elite is "merely" as rich as Elon Musk is today ;)
> I don't find it difficult to imagine a clique of 50 people or so sacrificing the welfere of the rest of the population to personally be able to live a life in ultimate luxery and AI generated bliss that lasts "forever". They will probably even find a way to frame it as the noble and moral thing to do.
I do find it difficult to imagine, for various reasons.
Not impossible — there's always going to be someone like Jim Jones — but difficult.
> That's a bad example even if you meant 1% of current USA GDP per person getting the treatment (i.e. 200 bn/person/year), because an AI capable of displacing human labour makes it very easy to supply that kind of wealth to everyone.
Clarification: I meant 1% per person of the GDP at the time the wealth is generated. NOT present day GDP. Medicine is one area where I think it's possible that costs per treatment may outpace the economic development generated by AI.
Any kind of consumption that the ultra rich may desire in the future that also grows faster than the economy is a candidate to have the same effect.
It's the same as for ASI X-risk: If some entity (human, posthuman, ASI or group of such) has the power AND desire to use every atom and/or joule of energy avaialble, then there may still be nothing left for everyone else.
Consider historical wonders, whether it's the Pyramids, the Palace of Versailles, Terracotta army, and so on. These tend to appear in regimes with very high levels of concentration of power. Not usually from democracies.
Edit, in case it's not obvious: Such wonders come at tremendous costs for the glory of single (or a few) individuals, paid for by the rest of society.
Often they're built during times when wealth generation is unusually high, but because of concentration of power, medium wealth can be quite low.
Once the police and military do not need a single human to operate, the basis for democracy may be completely gone.
Consider past periods of history where only a small number of soldiers could dominate much larger number of armed citizens, and you will notice that most of them were ruled by the soldier class. (knights, samurai, post Marian Reform Rome).
Democracy is really something that shows up in history whenever armed citizens form stronger armies than such elite militaries.
And a fully automated military, controlled by 0-1 humans at the top, is the ultimate concentration of power. Imagine the political leader you despise the most (current or historical) with such power.
> AI is safe if it does not cause extinction of humanity.
I don't think that is true. "AI is not safe if it cause extinction of humanity." is more likely to be true. But that is a necessary requirement but not sufficient.
Just think of a counter example: An AI system which wages war on humanity, wins and then keeps a stable breeding population of humans in abject suffering in a zoo like exhibit. This hypothetical AI did not cause extinction of humanity. Would you consider it safe? I would not.
That's called "s-risk" (suffering risk). Some people in the space do indeed take it much more seriously than "x-risk" (extinction risk).
If you are deeply morally concerned about this, and consider it likely, then you might want to consider getting to work on building an AI which merely causes extinction, ASAP, before we reinvent that one sci-fi novel.
Personally, I see no particular reason to think this is a very likely outcome. The AI probably doesn't hate us - we're just made out of joules it can use better elsewhere. x-risk seems much more justified to me as a concern.
The AI doesn't have to hate us for this outcome. In fact it might be done to cocoon and "protect" us. It just has different idea from us what needs to be protected and how. Or alternatively it can serve (perfectly or in a faulty way) the aims of its masters. A few lords reigning over suffering masses.
> If you are deeply morally concerned about this, and consider it likely, then you might want to consider getting to work on building an AI which merely causes extinction, ASAP, before we reinvent that one sci-fi novel.
What a weird response. Like one can't be concerned about two ( (or more!) things simultaneously? Talk about "Cutting off one's nose to spite one's face"
The quote I've heard is: 'The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made of atoms which it can use for something else': https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Tom-Chivers/dp/1474608787 (another book I've not read).
> Or alternatively it can serve (perfectly or in a faulty way) the aims of its masters.
Our state of knowledge is so bad that being able to do that would be an improvement.
The argument is that "humans live, but suffer" is a smaller outcome domain and thus less likely to be hit than an outcome incompatible with human life.
Because at that point, getting something to care about humans at all, you've already succeeded with 99% of the alignment task and only failed at the last 1% of making it care in a way we'd prefer. If it were obvious that rough alignment is easy but the last few bits of precision or accuracy are hard that'd be different.
I fail to see a broad set of paths that end up with a totally unaligned AGIs and yet humans live but in a miserable state.
Of course we can always imagine some "movie plot" scenarios that happen to get some low-probability outcome by mere chance. But that's focusing one's worry on winning an anti-lottery rather than allocating resources to the more common failure modes.
> already succeeded with 99% of the alignment task and only failed at the last 1% of making it care in a way we'd prefer.
Who is we? Humanity does not think with one unified head. I'm talking about a scenario where someone makes the AI which serves their goals, but in doing so harms others.
AGI won't just happen on its own. Someone builds it. That someone has some goals in mind (they want to be rich, they want to protect themselves from their enemies, whatever). They will fiddle with it until they think the AGI shares those goals. If they think they didn't manage to do it they will strangle the AGI in its cradle and retry. This can go terribly wrong and kill us all (x-risk). Or it can succeed where the people making the AGI aligned it with their goals. The jump you are making is to assume that if the people making the AGI aligned it with their goals that AGI will also align with all of humanity's goals. I don't see why that would be the case.
You are saying that doing one is 99% of the work and the rest is 1%. Why do you think so?
> Of course we can always imagine some "movie plot" scenarios that happen to get some low-probability outcome by mere chance.
Definitions are not based on probabilities. sanxiyn wrote "AI is safe if it does not cause extinction of humanity." To show my disagreement I described a scenairo where the condition is true (that is the AI does not cause extinction of humanity), but I would not describe as "safe AI". I do not have to show that this scenario is likely to show the issue with the statement. Merely that it is possible.
> focusing one's worry on winning an anti-lottery rather than allocating resources to the more common failure modes.
You state that one is more common without arguing why. Stuff which "plainly doesn't work and harmful for everybody" is discontinued. Stuff which "kinda works and makes the owners/creators happy but has side effects on others" is the norm, not the exception.
Just think of the currently existing superinteligences: corporations. They make their owners fabulously rich and well protected, while they corrupt and endanger the society around them in various ways. Just look at all the wealth oil companies accumulated for a few while unintentionally geo-engineering the planet and systematically suppressing knowledge about climate change. That's not a movie plot. That's the reality you live in. Why do you think AGI will be different?
> You are saying that doing one is 99% of the work and the rest is 1%. Why do you think so?
(Different person)
I think it's much starker than that, more even than 99.99% to 0.01%; the reason is the curse of high dimensionality.
If you imagine a circle, there's a lot of ways to point an arrow that's more than 1.8° away from the x-axis.
If you imagine a sphere, there's even more ways to point an arrow that's more than 1.8° away from the x-axis.
It gets worse the more dimensions you have, and there's a lot more than two axies of human values; even at a very basic level I can go "oxygen, food, light, heat", and that's living at the level of a battery farmed chicken.
Right now, we don't really know how to specify goals for a super-human optimiser well enough to even be sure we'd get all four of those things.
Some future Stalin or future Jim Jones might try to make an AGI, "strangle the AGI in its cradle and retry" because they notice it's got one or more of those four wrong, and then finally release an AI that just doesn't care at all about the level of Bis(trifluoromethyl)peroxide in the air, and this future villain don't even know that this is bad for the same reason I just got that name from the Wikipedia "List of highly toxic gases" (because it is not common knowledge): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highly_toxic_gases
> This can go terribly wrong and kill us all (x-risk). Or it can succeed where the people making the AGI aligned it with their goals. The jump you are making is to assume that if the people making the AGI aligned it with their goals that AGI will also align with all of humanity's goals.
Sure, but for s-risk-caused-by-human-intent scenario to become an issue the x-risk problem has to be solved or negligible.
If we had the technology to capture all of a human's values properly so that their outcomes are still be acceptable when executed and extrapolated by an AGI then applying the capture process to more than one human seems more like a political problem than one of feasibility.
> You are saying that doing one is 99% of the work and the rest is 1%. Why do you think so?
Because I'm not seeing a machine-readable representation of any human's values. Even a slice of any human's values anywhere. When we specify goals for reinforcement learning they're crude, simple proxy metrics and things go off the rails when you maximize them too hard. And by default machine minds should be assumed to be very alien minds, humans aren't occupying most of the domain space. Evolved antennas are a commonly cited toy example of things that humans wouldn't come up with.
> Definitions are not based on probabilities. sanxiyn wrote "AI is safe if it does not cause extinction of humanity."
It's a simplification crammed into a handful of words. Not sure what level of precision you were expecting? Perhaps a robust, checkable specification that will hold up to extreme scrutiny and potentially hostile interpretation? It would be great to have one of those. Perhaps we could then use it for training.
> Just think of the currently existing superinteligences: corporations.
They're superorganisms, not superintelligences. Even if we assume for the moment that the aggregate is somewhat more intelligent than an individual, I would still say that almost all of their power comes from having more resources at their disposal than individuals rather than being more intelligent.
And they're also slow, internally disorganized and their individual constituents (humans) can pursue their own agendas (a bit like cancer). They lack the unity of will and high-bandwidth communication between their parts that'd I'd expect from a real superintelligence.
And even as unaligned optimizers you still have to consider that they depend on humans not being extinct. You can't make profit without a market. That is like a superintelligence that has not yet achieved independence and therefore would not openly pursue whatever its real goals are and instead act in whatever way is necessary to not be shut down by humans. That's the self-preservation part of instrumental convergence.
> You state that one is more common without arguing why. Stuff which "plainly doesn't work and harmful for everybody" is discontinued. Stuff which "kinda works and makes the owners/creators happy but has side effects on others" is the norm, not the exception.
A superintelligence wouldn't be dumb. So game theory, deception and perhaps having a planning horizon that's longer than a rabid mountain lion's should be within its capabilities. That means "kinda works" is not the same as "selected for being compatible with human existence".
> Sure, but for s-risk-caused-by-human-intent scenario to become an issue the x-risk problem has to be solved or negligible.
Sure. I can chew gum and walk at the same time. s-risk comes after x-risk has been dealt with. Doesn't mean that we can't think of both.
> seems more like a political problem than one of feasibility
Don't know what to tell you but "political problem" is not 1% of the solution. Political problem is where things get really stuck. Even when the tech is easy the political problem is often intractable. There is no reason to think that this political problem will be 1%.
> Not sure what level of precision you were expecting?
I provided a variant of the sentence which I can agree with. I will copy it here in case you missed it: "AI is not safe if it causes extinction of humanity." (noticed and fixed a typo in it)
> They lack the unity of will and high-bandwidth communication between their parts that'd I'd expect from a real superintelligence.
Sure. If you know the meme[1] when the kids want to eat AGI, corporations is the "food we have at home". They are not kinda the real deal and they are kinda suck. They are literally made of humans and yet we are really bad at aligning them with the good of humanity. They are quite okay at making money for the owners though!
> A superintelligence wouldn't be dumb.
Yes.
> That means "kinda works" is not the same as "selected for being compatible with human existence".
During the AGI's infancy someone made it. That someone has spent a lot of resources on it, and they have some idea what they want to use it for. That initial "prompting" or "training" will have an imprint on the goals and values of the AGI. If it escapes and disassembles all of us for our constituent carbon then we run into the x-risk and we don't have to worry about s-risk anymore. What I'm saying is that if we avoid the x-risk, we are not safe yet. We have a gaping chasm of s-risk we can still fall into.
If the original makers created it to make them rich (very common wish) we can fall into some terrible future where everyone who is not recognised by the AGI as a shareholder is exploited by the AGI to the fullest extent.
If the original makers created it to win some war (another very common wish) the AGI will protect whoever they recognise as an ally, and will subjugate everyone to the fullest extent.
These are not movie scenarios, but realistic goals organisations wishing to create an AGI might have.
Have you heard the term "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger"? There is a not as often repeated variant of it: "what doesn't kill you sometimes makes you hurt so bad you wish it did".
Tbh, if you replaced the word "AI" with the word "technology" this sounds more like an overwhelming paranoia of power.
As technology progresses, there's also not much difference if the "creators" you listed pursued their goals with "dumb" technologies. People/Entities with differing interests will cross with your interests at some point and somebody will get hurt. The answer to such situations is the same as the past. You establish deterrence, you also adopt those technologies or AGI to serve your interests against their AGIs. And so balance is established.
> this sounds more like an overwhelming paranoia of power
You call it overwhelming paranoia, I call it well supported skepticism about power based on the observed history of humankind so far. The promise, and danger of AGIs is that they are intelectual force multipliers of great power. So if not properly treated they will also magnify inequalities in power.
But in general your observation that I’m not saying anything new about humans is true! This is just the age old story applied to a new technological development. That is why i find it strange how much pushback it received.
Yeah, the constant dissonance with AI safety is that every single AI safety problem is already a problem with large corporations not having incentives aligned with the good of people in general. Profit is just another paperclip.
Not only but also; they're also every problem with buggy software.
Corporations don't like to kill their own stakeholders; a misplaced minus sign, which has happened at least once*, and your AI is trying as hard as possible to do the exact opposite of one of the things you want.
Is that dissonance or shows that the concept is generally applicable? Human inventions can be misaligned with human values. The more powerful the invention, the more damage it can do if it is misaligned. The corporation is a powerful invention. Super intelligence is the most powerful invention imaginable.
It is quite amusing to read this essay 8 years after it has been published, now that we know about the similarities of how large language models (LLMs) and the human brain function.
The average brain does indeed not copy processed information perfectly, as the author demonstrates. It generalizes and creates or strengthens connections between neurons that represents that information. Just like how LLMs increase or decrease their own weights.
I was irritated by how strongly the author insists that "nothing is stored in the brain", almost to a point where the author seems to suggest it's stored somewhere else entirely, when after paragraphs of paragraphs the gist of it is that information is not stored directly, like in the case of the dollar bill, not as a bitmap, so to speak. There is still some form of incomplete, lossy encoding of information and knowledge stored in the brain. I don't see how this would invalidate the analogies with computers.
This isn't new or groundbreaking in any way. Cognitive science basically tries to figure out the "algorithms" at work when we store or retrieve information. They're still analogies of course, but that we don't have an image of a dollar bill stored in some synapses hardly isn't news to anyone in the field.
i.e. I am the sum of all trillion of my features, but I am also mostly the sum of a set of a few thousand informative ones combined in linear/nonlinear ways
You could drop a verse or two of Shakespeare from my memory and I'd probably still be recognisable to myself and those around me
The whole idea that memory is stored in a distributed, lossy, and redundant fashion is hardly a new one; I read about the concept of Sparse Distributed Memory in Science News as a youngster more than 3 decades ago, and it in turn was informed by earlier ideas of sparse and spatial-coded memory (e.g. holographic metaphors of recollection).
LLMs provide evidence that you can build systems with these exact properties; no individual perceptron stores a concept, and the encoding is extremely sparse and redundant.
Of course, LLMs don't demonstrate conclusively that the brain works this way, but given that this form of information storage and retrieval works across a real analogous system refutes those that said this would be impossible for the brain to do.
We know no such thing.
The human brain behaves nothing like an LLM.
This article stands the test of time, whereas you appear to be subscribing to the fallacy that whatever strange new ideology comes out of silicone valley is the truth.
Do check out neurology some time.
Neural networks are a total misnomer and absolutely butcher any biological insights it may have been loosely based upon.
Hey, can you please make your substantive points without resorting to the flamewar style? We want curious, respectful conversation here.
This is especially important when you're advocating for a minority view, because if you post like you did here, you just create an additional reason for people to reject what you're saying.
You seem to not understand LLMs nor the human brain if you think the article stands the test of time. Even the field of neuroscience 8 years ago would have issue with the claims made in the article.
I fully agree with the author on that text editing is nothing but cumbersome.
But instead of modifying and (hopefully) improving on what we have now, I would actually prefer an entirely different solution; one that disables any touch input on textboxes.
In place of touch, I'd prefer a new keyboard screen containing a joystick to move the text cursor with.
On the opposite side of the keyboard, you could have all the context buttons, together with a 'select' button which can be held while moving the joystick to make a selection.
Add a toggle button to the existing keyboard to switch from and to these new input options and you're all set.
Whether this solution is intuitive enough for the average mobile user is up for discussion.
While I've always had a negative outlook on the modern school system due to my own experiences, I fail to see how the answer to the title could be anything but "yes".
I've seen this many times before, where a teacher seems to fail to realize that their students don't just have their own exam to prepare for; they have to prepare for many other exams at the same time, all the while struggling to balance their study time with their responsibilites at home, their social life and possibly their part-time job at the same time.
So when an answer sheet is just readily available online, there aren't many students who wouldn't choose to spend a few hours memorizing the answers so they have a little more breathing room for other (possibly more difficult) exams.
The statements about how this teacher apparently feels oh-so stressful about this situation that he purposefully created himself, all the while dismissing any and all critique from people because they aren't "teachers of any kind" feels very childish and leaves a very bad taste in my mouth.
Ok, let's not inconvenience the students anymore with studying then since they're so busy. We should just award them a degree after 4 years of being in the unversity's register.
My point is that expecting time-pressed students to ignore freely available answer sheets is like expecting a hungry horse to ignore a carrot dangling in front of them.
There is nothing wrong with removing their ability to cheat, but purposefully uploading answer sheets and then getting angry that students made use of them isn't. In fact, it's not just wrong: it's ethically wrong.
I think the "anger" is merited since the students (1) cheated when they were clearly told not to and (2) marked answers that were "obviously wrong" which implies that not even a modicum of effort was invested in demonstrating knowledge.
The "busy" argument is a poor one. We're all busy. Part of gaining an education is learning how to manage your time. As a professor myself, I know for a fact that most students manage their time poorly, yet many students will still pull the "busy" argument when it simply doesn't apply. Rather, just admit to procrastinating. Either way, the outcome is the same (poor performance).
To sum up my sentiments to cheaters... "Play stupid games, win stupid prizes."
Isn't the answer extremely obvious?
Girls grow up faster than boys, while boys have a longer growing period that extends further (or is equal to) than the schooling period.
I'd be interested in seeing an extended study in the general differences between the study progress of girls and boys seperated by school year and age.
This is a preposterous hand-waving away of hundreds of distinct factors so that you can excuse massive, systemic bias against boys as being a natural outcome.
Would you so flippantly make the same claim about racial disparities in education?
I am not waving away all other factors, I am merely stating that the difference of mental development between girls and boys is, at least to me, quite obviously the largest by far.
Mental development has an enormous impact on school performance. Areas that "our" Western school system bases its grading on, from memorization to attention, are things that children only get better at when they grow more mature.
The lack of quality in modern school systems aside, I do not believe in forced equality and fully believe that sorting children by age hurts their academic progress tremendously.
By extend, separating boys from girls while teaching each at a different pace might actually improve the educational quality of every child, rather than trying to appeal to merely the average for whatever reason.
I believe that the above applies to any characteristic. Education should, in my opinion, be based on an individual's learning capability, but I suppose that would go against everything the modern school system stands for.
I don’t think that your answer is obvious at all. It seems just as or much more likely to do with differential factors other than age (pedagogy, environment, etc.) than it is model boys as being N-2 years “behind” the girls. That seems very narrow.
The first hour was great. I was constantly encountering new rooms and solving puzzles. The many times where the game decided to give me nothing but rooms leading to dead ends was annoying, but I still had things to explore in the next run so it didn't matter that much. After that first hour, the game became a slog. I encountered the same rooms, solved the same two puzzles for resources and was constantly praying for the RNG to give me something new. There is some RNG manipulation, but not enough to mitigate the boring part of the game. There are a few interesting overarching puzzles, but most of them are wrapped in multiple layers of RNG.
For example, for one puzzle you need a specific item that randomly spawns, use it in a room that randomly spawns which you need to unlock with another room that also randomly spawns. It took me 6 hours for the game to give me a run where I got all three of those things in a single run. The reward? Some resources that I have next to no use for and some clues that I can only experiment with if the RNG deems me worthy.
I have absolutely no idea where the praise for the game comes from. Maybe this game is perfect for those who are really into roguelites, but for me personally it just feels like the game is wasting my time for no reason at all.