Hello,

Looking for some VAs for a game demo I'm putting together. 3 key characters are a middle-aged male CEO (the main villain of the game), a young eager male job candidate (the main 'friend' character) and a corporate female job candidate (the main 'nemesis'). Probably only a few hundred words of dialogue for the demo.

Willing to pay at 250 per character.

No AI is used in the project / your voice will not be fed to an AI.

I remember hearing some conspiracy theorists at uni talking about how the government could employ everyone and push unemployment to zero. This would then put upward pressure on wages and working conditions.

Presumably, something like this was tried in communist countries and I'm presuming with no actual knowledge that it didn't work. At the same time, it sounds logical.

So why is it right or wrong?

Effective Altruism is a movement that claims to numerically choose which causes and charities are worth donating to, or spending time on. Related organisations include Give Well, Co-Efficient Giving (previously Open Philanthropy), and 80,000 hours.

I think modern cults have the following characteristics: (1) a charismatic leader, with key flaws (2) a strange ideology that resists logical questioning with an "everyone else is wrong" mentality, (3) recruitment of young vulnerable people, with lofty promises of what joining the cult will do, (4) a narrative around the world ending, and only they can stop it.

EA fits these criteria. They do some good things but this does not disprove my view.

1. EA's leaders are William McAskill, a philosopher, and Dustin Moskovitz, the billionaire co-founder of Facebook. McAskill is the guy behind "Longtermism", the belief that people in the future are worth more than people who currently exist, and that we should prioritise long-term risks like human extinction over say, homelessness. McAskill claims to donate 50% of his income to charity, but he is allegedly bankrolled by Moskovitz, who funds his lifestyle (allegedly funded $10 million towards his book promotions).
2. EA's main philosophy is utilitarianism, which they repackage for branding purposes as "rationalism." Utilitarianism has very well known harms. Utilitarianism tends to ignore minority rights, democracy, and shorter term suffering, with the common claim that the ends justifies the means.

These views are endemic in EA. I've met people who think working as a doctor, nurse, fireman, teacher or any other worthwhile job is "pointless," because those jobs only help people 1 on 1, and you can have a "bigger impact" elsewhere. At least a dozen people at EA conferences have made this case to me. This is from people who themselves benefit from doctors in their daily lives...

It is very common to raise jobs or causes at EA events and be aggressively asked "what's the impact of that?" for things that the public broadly support. For example, I know of two projects on protecting democracy that EA has defunded. I was also told that US teenagers unaliving themselves because of AI chatbots is not a "high impact enough" topic for research by a Co-Efficient grant giver.

Finally, Sam Bankman-Fried, the billionaire crypto scammer, was closely associated with EA and McAskill, and allegedly defrauded his customers in order to use their money for charity. The ends justify the means is the ideology here.

3. Most of EA's recruitment happens on college campuses. Young people are obviously easy targets for cutls. The entry point is often something like 80k hours, which promises you can have a "high impact" career, that you have limited time to do so, and that they have all the answers for you. Instead of giving proper career coaching, to idk identify your strengths, 80k hours ideologically pushes it's "cause areas" that it unilaterally considers "high impact."

This seems harmless, but I've met people who've quit working in ER rooms, feeding the homeless, working on vaccines, working on green energy, working on climate change, working as public defence lawyers, all because they've been convinced their jobs are not high impact enough by EA career coaches. Some of these conversations have been devastating to me. To see a young person throw it all away for ideology when they were already making a difference is so terrible. Many of these people now write ai safety articles no one reads but they're convinced they're saving the world.

EA prays on this vulnerability. Young people lack support and encouragement and often they just need to be told "what you're doing matters." Instead, they're told what they're doing is low impact and tricked into "high impact" careers as chosen by a handful of philosopher kings.

4. EA's two main cause areas currently are AI existential risks and pandemic preparedness. These two areas are also doomsday end of the world narratives, reminiscent of cults. "Unless you work, donate or give time to EA" the argument seems to run, "the world will end." Or in a related way, "you can be a part in preventing the end of the world by working on these high impact causes."

This is seductive, and it's also fairly obviously manipulation. The world might end by these two things, but the grift will certainly never end.

While it's true that these two areas are important, they are not the only thing people should be working on, nor donating to. This is very obvious but literally try say this at an EA conference. I've had several people get very angry with me when I've said this, and some have claimed I'm irrational (I'm an academic with a PhD, not that they care).

It's disturbing to see longterm existential risks being framed as the only "high impact" things people can do. Many of the people I meet at EA events are from San Francisco, they walk past homeless people everyday and have nothing to say about that. They change the topic when you bring up social causes, or systemic change. It's almost like they're wilfully blind to what's wrong in the world. To make an obvious point: private philanthropy is much less "high impact" than government aid. If western countries committed 2% of GDP to aid we'd probably end world hunger. Private philanthropy is literally peanuts in this context.

The fact that EA are funded by billionaires, who need not worry about "lower impact" problems, is the final nail in the coffin for me. Obviously the only concern billionaires have are existential risks. These are the only risks that will affect them.

Tl;Dr: EA has all the elements of a cult, from persuasive leaders, to seductive promises, to world ending narratives and ingroup thinking.

As in, do I need a tutorial covering the basics. Pressing E to interact with an object, pressing shift to sprint, pressing space bar to jump? Are these just presumed now?

I have some characters in my narrative game who are robots. They have dialogue interactions. There seem to be a few options of how to give them a "voice."

• Text-to-voice: old style robotic voices found on windows.
• Voice actors: human voices but not robotic sounding.
• Beeps / boops: basically how star wars does robots, where they beep with subtitles but don't talk English.

Which would you prefer?

Edit: To provide more context, the robots are humanoid looking. The game features other voice acted human characters, and dialogue / branching narrative is a core feature.

When I try to look up how / when to use music in games, all I find on tutorials on how to make music. That's not what I'm asking.

I'm curious when music should be used, and when it shouldn't, and how this interrelates to level design? Should the default mode be silence, with only occasional music? Should noise be constant? At what point in levels should music play and how?

Are there resources on this?

I'm interested in the features of imsims that go beyond combat and stealth. Would people say dialogue choices, environment interactions, many paths to completing objectives?

AI papers are currently flooding journals with low quality work, while high quality work struggles to get seen in that environment. No one has time to read all of these papers and most senior professors I know no longer review papers (they got theirs, so why do anything for others attitude).

This has created a weird crisis in academia. We're still expected to publish but increasingly the competition is a literal robot. Ideas are punished and vapid, bland, cliche prose is all over the place.

I talk to academics who don't think anymore. Everything is AI. It's like talking to someone dead inside. They have no idea, no life, no creativity. Meanwhile, they are publishing and getting promotions while good candidates (who take the time to do good work) are getting overlooked.

Added to this is the related crisis of AI authored resumes and cover letters, inflating the expertise of unqualified candidates, making the job market a particularly weird hellscape.

Thoughts?