Waiting for the comments to the effect of "just because this guy imagined the Torment Nexus and is explicitly warning us about the Torment Nexus doesn't mean it's wrong to want to try to build the Torment Nexus, especially if me building the Torment Nexus might make my descendants nauseatingly rich. And if I don't immediately build the Torment Nexus, someone else will, and besides, who's to say they'll actually use the Torment Nexus as a nexus of literal torment?"
This add a new reading for me of the story, given by the author himself.
My first reading was about all the stories of uploading, having our digital selves somewhere, some way of immortality and so on, and how in reality things should surely would go wrong, at least for most, in this way.
Then it was the Lena title of an mmacevedo wikipedia-like entry, and all the idea of that our digital content would degrade with time somehow as happened with the digital photo of that model.
Then ChatGPT came out, and saw something similar to the use of mmacevedo in reality. What if the AIs that power ChatGPT or their future versions have consciousness, feelings, etc, but still are still used that way? What about our creations, our content, what we do, being used as training those AIs and in some way we are the ones trapped there, or at least something at which we put a lot of ourselves to produce?
Then there is the uploading edge, that is something similar to the Star Trek teleportation, at the very best we will have something that think that is us inside a computer, while we keep living and being ourselves in our own body, or being outlived by it, but the original us will eventually die, and the digital version may behave like us but internally is something else (like, not our full memories, or behaving different in different situations, or whatever). Zendegi by Greg Egan a bit touches this approach.
But this new reading is about the present, our western capitalistic trends and how most of us is used by them. It is not just about work. And usually we are not aware of the chains that ties us.
In any case, for all the readings it is a great story.
