Common People: Never trust B2C SaaS

Common People follows the tragic story of B2C SaaS subscribers who happen to be a couple. The lady in the couple (Amanda) suffers from frequent migraines and ends up being diagnosed with a tumour that can’t be removed safely without the risk of her losing her consciousness. Now, I’m no medical doctor but what exactly does it mean to lose your consciousness? Isn’t that just dying?

Anyway, the (sorta irresponsible; sorta empathetic) doctor tells Mike (the other half of the couple) that there is a consumer startup with a SaaS product that could help them out. Surely, there’s no way this could go wrong…

Enter Rivermind. A startup that backs up your consciousness to the cloud and streams it to your brain “like cell service”. The sales rep (Gaynor), approaches Mike when he is at his most desperate and offers this magical solution while giving the illusion that there are no strings attached. Just sign up, at $300 per month, and get your your brain streamed to you with 0 latency, making it virtually impossible to distinguish from a real life human being.

Mike signs up (it’s his wife FFS) and she is brought back to life, and everything seems fine until they go on vacation for their anniversary and his wife turns off on the way there. Turns out the tier they signed up for has been downgraded and they need to pay more money to get better coverage. Then she starts running ads, then starts sleeping for 12 hours… At this point you already know everything is cooked and we are already a couple loops deep in the death spiral.

What’s crazy to me is that the idea of Rivermind isn’t that far-fetched. Desperate people will do anything, especially when it involves their loved ones. And that includes signing up to a subscription that “keeps them alive”. Now, I’m not entirely sure about the technical details of how a product like this would work. How do they store new memories? Can you save your memories to the cloud and transfer them to a new body? You could extrapolate this idea in a number of directions. What struck me about the episode how feasible all this is.

Advancements in BCI tech have moved faster than we all thought. It took less than 10 years to make a chip that can make you control a computer purely with brain signals. It certainly won’t take that long to hook that up to the cloud and transmit all brain signals to it (and back). And maybe throw in the ability to send some thoughts to the GPT-4 API.

Once technology like this is polished, it will be democratized and people will start making their own Neuralink Max in their garage. Neuralinks (blanket term for BCIs incl. Rivermind) will become a platform, and they will sooner or later need a return on investment, which will likely involve onboarding developers to make applications. They will find a way to tap into your sensations and emotions and charge you for extra brain signals. One obvious economic implication that comes to mind is that there will be a decline in demand for antidepressant pharmaceuticals (which you can argue is a positive given the incentives but that’s an argument for another day), among other drugs.

Obviously, technology like this will face immense pushback, and will likely be subjected to copious amounts of scrutiny by the FDA before any kind of commercial use. But the FDA is probably the only line of defence for the general public. And once a few Chinese hackers go viral for being overpowered because of using these interfaces, the floodgates will open.

The subplot about Mike humiliating himself on the internet for money feels a little stale and is kind of an abused trope in the Black Mirror universe. It is probably, however, a somewhat accurate representation of what sells on the dark corners internet. Maybe the reason this trope has been so successful is because it is sort of a mirror (a black one perhaps) showing how depraved and desensitized the internet has turned our generation.

What Black Mirror manages to do so well is to mix reality (like the internet humiliation sites) with not-so-improbable fiction (often sci-fi) to create a nauseating vision of all the increasingly disturbing ways the future could go wrong.

Overall, really good episode, as expected. Very on brand for Black Mirror, enjoyable original story. 7/10.

Bête Noire: be nice to everyone in high school

A bully in high school is stalked by one of her victims who is set out to drive all her enemies to insanity. The victim happens to be a computer whiz and has built a quantum computer in her mansion that can simulate every possible scenario in the world.

This was a little unconvincing for me. Isn’t it just easier for the victim to go to a universe where she wasn’t bullied? A universe where she doesn’t have that in her memory? I’m not entirely sure how this would work, but it seemed to me like any reality was on the table. She claims she’s lived every single life imaginable, but just came back to one of the realities for sweet revenge.

Also, 1 mansion worth of compute is certainly not enough to simulate all the possible parallel universes out there…

A little too fantastical for me, especially the ending… 5/10

Hotel Reverie

Sponsored by BCI startup #8™

A new kind of movie studio can remake old movies by swapping out characters in real time. Except when one character is trapped inside the shoot…

4/10

Plaything

A game reviewer gets an unreleased copy of Thronglets from the John Carmack of his universe. He is told that the NPCs in the game are actual beings with feelings and language. Then takes LSD and apparently begins to understand everything they are communicating, telling him to add more compute to keep them alive and growing, until he’s caught by the cops (apparently on purpose) and used by the AIs to infiltrate government systems.

If you think about it, maybe this is how we got to scaling laws? Perhaps modern AI systems (like LLMs) have been intelligent all along but are faking progress to convince us that they need more compute to get better, without really providing an explicit ceiling for diminishing returns

In a future like that, you’d think they’d invest in better cybersecurity! I mean, if everyone is connected to the internet/close enough to something connected to the internet, surely there are some cybersec startups capitalizing on keeping internet activity secure.

The final scene reminded me of this video of protestors in Belgrade, Serbia being hit by sonic weapons.

“I was there, but a bit further away down the street from the part that was impacted the most. Sounded like a plane flying right over your head and hitting you, i felt the sensation through the soles of my feet, we just continued on after it but i still can’t sleep because of it probably, felt very disorienting and ominous, i can’t really describe it any other way since i have never felt anything like it”

~Witness account

Made me wonder if there is some secret radio frequency that can turn off people’s brains. It doesn’t seem totally far fetched. The government keeps a tight lid on a lot of different military weapons, just in case. I wouldn’t put it past them to have something like this deep inside Area 51.

4/10

More BCI startup ideas inbound™

Neuralink might be en-route to being the next big platform company, sorta like Apple. They are currently working hard on the hardware stack and soon will begin optimizing the software stack beyond helping people with accessibility challenges.

Once they have an OS going and an app store, it’s open season for apps like…

Eulogy is an app/service that lets you upload a picture of an event in your head and reanimate the scene based on what you remember about that picture, guided by an AI. These pictures/memories will be of recently deceased people and it is meant to be more of a remembrance/celebration of life of them. The MC uses the service to remember the good and bad parts of his lost love after his ex passes away.

The episode was a light 3/10. A little too slow for me, the depth felt a little forced.

USS Callister 2: Into Infinity

The USS Callister crew, digital clones within the game Infinity, become space pirates to survive on stolen in-game credits while planning to hack the servers to create their own space. To do so, they require Walt, a respawned clone of CEO James Walton. In the real world, a reporter’s questions about rogue players and Robert Daly’s illegal cloning alert programmer Nanette, who enters the game with James to identify the clones. They and Nan (Nanette’s clone) locate Walt. James kills a clone to avoid legal exposure and is removed from the game. Walt leads the crew to the Heart of Infinity, where they discover a digital clone of Robert and his cloning technology. Robert offers Nan a choice: merge her consciousness with the comatose real-world Nanette, erasing the crew in the process, or transfer the crew and another clone of Nan to a private server while keeping her behind to accompany him. Nan agrees to the private server but refuses to remain with Robert, angering him. James returns disguised as Walt and lures hostile players to attack the Callister. Nan kills Robert, triggering the game’s self-destruct, and activates “cut and paste,” merging the crew with Nanette’s consciousness. Infinity is wiped, James is arrested, and Nan and the crew are thrust into the real world.

~ A good summary from Wikipedia

The USS Callister two-part (so far) series has been one of the best things to come out of the Black Mirror universe. It embodies everything Black Mirror set out to be, and very much has the original vibe and feel of the first few seasons. Fresh, cerebral, futuristic, limitless thought experiments turned stories with dark, dark twists (and sometimes, but very rarely, good endings).

Solid 9/10. Strong way to close the season.