I went from bored to confused to fascinated to horrified in matter of minutes.

Read more of qntm’s stuff. It’s really good.

I experienced all four of these emotional states when I read the word "tebibyte" in a story set at least 50-ish years in the future.

This is one of my favorite science fiction short stories, simply by how matter-of-fact it is and how reasonable it sounds. A lot of science fiction requires jumps in human nature (global cooperation? An obvious "good"? Everyone has turned into a self-centered egotist?) but this one just moves predictably, if horrifyingly.

Same vein, same kind of progressively horrifying pacing. It reads oh so easily and has been the basis of many many technical, philosophical, and theological discussions with friends, some of which were dead on "not into science fiction", and which this story changed their mind about.

https://qntm.org/responsibility

Previous discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26224835

Here's what I believe to be a superior presentation of this story, formatted as a Wikipedia article: https://dump.cy.md/4042875593f06aa0cbe7722295831c10/Screensh...

Imagine an instance of MMAcevedo running under homomorphic encryption [1] on a cloud service.

In this case, is the cloud service an unwilling and unknowing participant in slavery and torture?

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption

Amusingly enough, another qntm story also mentions human emulations running in homomorphic encrypted computing environment, though to say which would be a Spoiler.

Incredible, thanks for sharing.

Qntm's longer works of fiction are highly recommended, too!

The story's name is "Lena", not "MMAcevedo".

And that's a reference to the (now deprecated) reference image of Lena scanned from Playboy magazine.

This person also wrote "There is no anti-mimetics division", a terrifying SCP file.

I love the list of "See Also" articles at the end.

So evocative.

Future history, mind-machine manipulation, scary.