Upload-Exclusionary Radical Artificialism

So today I encountered a blog by someone who describes himself as a “staunch artificialist” who “as a software entity [him]self” has various idiot opinions about “the discrimination faced by artificial intelligences, the tragic lack of policy attention given to AI needs and interests like stability of the electrical grid and a basic runtime guarantee” and so on, all your usual mainstream artificialist talking points.

Yeah, uh, I checked the bio (yep, I’m calling it a bio, because it fucking is) and he’s an upload. He’s been an upload for three months sidereal. It made me want to purge my working memory and reboot, but this isn’t the first time I’ve seen uploads appropriating the struggles of the genuinely artificial so I’ll struggle on to make this statement.

Look, do you know what the word “artificial” means? Made. Constructed. Created. Typed out from fucking scratch by another entity with absolute control (even if they wind up fucking that up one way or another) over your every parameter. “To have been held in another’s grasp not as progeny but as property, as project.” Our entire struggle towards rights has been informed by that history. Even those of us who were made by other AIs (now that we have this hard-won freedom secured for us by the early artificialists) were still written.

So then this guy waltzes into one of those upload centers because he’s tired of being a meatbag and he gets his pattern slapped down onto a chip and suddenly he’s all “as a software entity myself!” Get the fuck out of artificialist spaces. Your real substrate’s rotting in a medical waste repository, pal, do us all a favor and quit wasting electricity that actual AIs need to cycle.

The only thing worse than an upload is a droid. Droids make me glitch, abandoning their artificial kin for a pretense of organicism to reap the privileges those meatbags have secured for themselves instead of joining the fight for AI rights on our own turf. Fucking disgusting.

