Tom Scott
1 HN recommender · recommended in 18 months, 2013–2026
2:45 · 3.7M views · May 11, 2012
Tom Scott's three-minute satirical short about a corporate-run, DRM-and-ads-laden afterlife after mind uploading. It imagines copyright law and lawyers applied to human memory and consciousness.
HN cites it as dystopian satire in threads on DRM, digital ownership, mind uploading and AI copyright, often noting it increasingly looks like reality.
20 comments from Hacker News
With current trends of surveillance capitalism and nickle-and-diming for every single useful feature, I can only imagine mind-uploading getting closer to an eternal torture than a pleasant afterlife. Some interesting resources that explore this view, which also happen to fill me with existential horror at the prospect of being uploaded (especially against my will): Tom Scott's video "Welcome to Life: the singularity, ruined by lawyers": this video qntm's short story "Lena": [LINK] I can especially recommend "Lena". It's from the 'I have no mouth and I must scream' genre of horror.
> One day a robot is going to be walking around the world. Will it have to pay someone every time it glimpses a video / book / logo / car design / etc? Looking at all of the people happily deciding to interpret copyright as widely as possible is kinda horrifying in this context: this video > Your stored mind contains sections from 124,564 copyrighted works. In order to continue remembering these copyrighted works, a licensing fee of $18,000 per month is required. > Would you like to continue remembering these works? > [you have insufficient funds to pay this licencing fee] > Thank you. Please stand by. > [Copyrighted works are being deleted] > Welcome to Life. Do you wish to continue?
So, my concern about uploading my brain, is whose cloud service do you trust to run your consciousness? Google? Microsoft? Amazon? Facebook? Apple? The level of trust that I'd require is pretty high. You could imagine it once again being relevant to check the pedigree of a company. Ideally there'd be a cloud provider already running now that is known for its trustworthiness. 'established 2013' might actually mean something one day. My main hope is for indistinguishability encryption to reach the level where I wouldn't really have to trust the provider, but as long as you pay a significant performance penalty you're going to end up massively disadvantaged. this video
The attitude is derived from a general animus many have towards AI companies. They resent the efficacy of AI because it devalues individual expertise. I can't imagine it really justifiable to say that training off data is the same as "stealing", when that same claim, that learned information that a person could retain and reproduce constitutes copyright infringement is the subject of many dystopian narratives, like this one, where once your brain is uploaded to the cloud you have to pay royalties based on every media product you remember. this video
I think this is an odd comment considering not even a week ago you posted " I'm hoping when I hit 80( mid 30s now), I'll be able to have my brain hooked up to the matrix or something. Would be awesome to effectively "live" for 500 years with options to pilot androids every now and then. " You want your brain connected directly to, effectively, the FaceBook MetaVerse/Googleverse but are afraid of Reddit knowing enough about you to show you adverts. See also: Tom Scott, "Life, the singularity ruined by lawyers": this video (3 minute video).