I have, like several people before me, a confession to make.

Yes, it's one of these again. A little under four years ago, I arrived here under mysterious circumstances from another planet - well, another world, the planet still looked the same as your Earth, if you didn't zoom in too much - with no fucking clue what was going on. I'm telling you this on April 1st for the sake of plausible deniability, and also because I kind of want the tradition to keep going. Even if most of the other people who say they're from other planets are probably lying or delusional, I would hesitantly guess that there are others who really did come from Elsewhere - Eliezer's the one who seems most likely to me, maybe 80% chance or so, and there were a few more who also stood out. If anyone else comes from somewhere else and woke up here for unidentified reasons, tell us. I really need more data on this.

Okay, where the hell do I start. My world doesn't have a special name - it was just "Earth." Yes, that's the English name; English was the language spoken by the supermajority of my planet, or at least something close to English. As best as I can figure out, our histories broke off somewhere around 1600, so the difference between my English and yours is about twice as large as that between either of ours and Shakespeare - and probably a little more different than that, because we picked up a lot more French and Italian loanwords than you did. If you want to give my world its own name, you can use "Zanem," I guess; it seems like the least awkward name to form a location name out of my own.

I don't know what specific point in history we broke off from each other at, there are far too many events that were different between our worlds for me to recap everything, and I have pretty much no model at all of where the differences come from. If you want a very rough outline of major things that happened over the course of several centuries... there was our equivalents of your Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution, which took about a century in total; there was Britain and France merging into one country that took over... not the entire world, but at least 75%; there was functional and convenient contraception, at around 1800 on your timeline, that resulted in the population falling below ten million after nearly everyone realized they didn't actually want children, which then led to a couple formerly tiny groups who had understood eugenics better than anyone else building themselves up into each at least 10% of the population; there was the new society built from a revolution of not-quite-libertarians-but-that's-the-closest-analogy; and then of course the last half a century or so has been spent gradually building more and more robotic technology and factories, and expanding them into more and more fields.

I'm sure that brought up more questions than it answered, but I should probably focus more on the part that I know more about, which is what life was like for an ordinary person. If I had to choose one thing that was most different between our worlds... I would want to say something related to intelligence, or the basic reasoning abilities that everyone here seems to lack, but in actuality, the one thing that I most directly feel the impacts of is that on my planet, nobody has to work. I mean, you do have to work a little, but on a scale of, say, thirty thousand hours a lifetime, or a little under an hour per day - on average, of course, so if you worked five times a week for forty years, like people have to on your planet, it would be a bit under three hours a day, which is still enough that people on our planet were furious they had to work so much. I hadn't really had much of a job by the time I got here, but I still had picked up a bit of dread of how much work I would have to some day do. Once I got here... well, I'm sure you can imagine what it was like, at least a little.

Why don't we have to work so much? Well, again, I don't have much of a model of what's going on - all of the differences I can think of still aren't enough to account for it all - but most of it, I would guess, was because of automation. We had a pretty big head start on technology we had on our world - the low population and lack of work getting done means we were progressing a lot more slowly than you, but we were still a little ahead by the time I got here, in all fields other than AI, which had been correctly identified as a threat to society, and heavily monitored by... you could call it a government; it's not at all a government, but I'll get to that part soon. But robots and machines doing manual labor was far ahead of you, and we had the advantage of being able to cover all the land on the planet (save Europe, where 95% of the population lived, and a few smaller natural preserves, for if you wanted to visit even cooler nature than the still pretty exciting nature we had in our backyards) with farms, mines, factories, and solar panels to fuel them. And we had mechanically controlled transportation, both for personal use and for delivering items. Anything you wanted, you ordered it, and it came to your home.

So literally any job involving making non-intellectual material goods, even houses and foods and so on, was automated, and the same for transportation. That took up a large fraction of jobs, and it didn't stop there. Cleaning was mostly done by robots, physical stores didn't exist at all, people didn't really require much customer service for most things they might want to buy, and even most repairs were done by robots, with some human supervision. Jobs that were business-related were also mostly gone; businesses just had far fewer employees, and there weren't that many businesses, anyway, with everything being so cheap to produce. Lawyers didn't exist, either - I'll get into how laws work later, but to the limited extent that there even are laws, they are not enormous piles of regulations like we have here. People from my world would have found it a contradiction in terms, that people in yours weren't able to remember all the laws; the whole point is that everyone knows what all the laws are, and if there are so many that you can't list them all from memory, you are doing something wrong.

The main jobs that did still exist were... I don't know the statistics on which jobs are most common, but not-exactly-doctors-but-that's-the-closest-analogy (the literal translation is Body-Fixers) was one of the careers that couldn't be easily automated. There were of course the people who invented the new technologies that made it easier to automate things. There were the people who carried out random monthly inspections of robots to make sure they weren't making any human-obvious errors. That was the stereotypical manual-labor job; if you didn't have much in the way of marketable skills, or if you preferred working a boring job for a shorter time than a more fun job for a longer time, then you worked in Machine-Quality-Control. And of course, the most common job of all was raising children. It's not that people from my world don't like raising children at all - we did, it's just that the ratio of how much the average adult would voluntarily want to be with children, and the amount that is necessary to raise the average child, is somewhere around 0.7, and that's even even after a lot of people coming up with ideas on how to make child-raising more efficient. And so a not-quite-a-government-division-I'll-explain-it-later funds the development of each new generation, so our population doesn't disappear.

I was young, when I left, and like most people under 30 or so, I hadn't started doing any real work, in the sense of things I was doing solely for the payment. But I had still gotten in about 1% of that 30,000 hours or so, just doing things for fun, trying them out and seeing what they were like - which, actually, makes up about a third of all labor on my planet. What they can't automate, they try to make as little like work as possible - and while this of course decreases the amount they can contribute, due to lack of practice-based skill, people are willing to accept slightly longer hours to make up for that, as long as they're having fun. This especially applies to raising kids - it pays horribly, compared to other jobs, but that's worth it, since, as mentioned before, they already would have been doing on average 70% of it for free. I helped with the younger kids, even before being an adult myself, as well as trying out the other standard not-well-paid-because-they're-so-fun jobs - writing, acting, singing, programming, those sorts of things. Barring a Singularity-level event in the next century, which prediction markets only put around 20%, I still had ninety years ahead of me for me to get the work done, I thought, which was more than enough time, so I lived off of a loan - it's standard practice for kids to borrow enough money to support yourself for a couple decades, then pay it back with interest many decades later, so that you don't have to work until some time around your late twenties or early thirties. There are of course prediction markets on when, if ever, you'll pay it back - pretty much all businesses get advice from prediction markets of some sort, and the not-really-a-government as well.

Actually, maybe now I should start getting into how the government, or lack thereof, works. The first thing to know is that there is not any such thing as a central government - each of the public services is handled by different organizations, and each person has a choice of which to subscribe to - indeed, in order to get their services, you of course have to be a paying customer. There's no sense of "rulership" or anything like that - you're buying a service, same as buying food, except that this time, it's something like safety. Most of the law-enforcement part is done by the Enforcers-Of-Mutual-Nonharm, whose job is to prevent people from hurting others - including by, when necessary, forcing those people to pay reparations to their victims' insurance, in amounts that are voted on by subscribers to ensure that, to an approximation, any victim of a crime will in retrospect be very slightly glad about the crime-and-repayment in sum. People hire private Enforcers-Of-Mutual-Nonharm to investigate crimes that have happened to them, in a basic market system, while the Public-Enforcers-Of-Mutual-Nonharm are funded by a voluntary-in-principle-tax-but-if-you-don't-pay-the-tax-your-cost-to-hire-EOMNs-increases-a-hundredfold-so-everyone-pays-it, and the PEOMNs monitor the EOMNs, ensure that they never collect undeserved payments, and, in very rare cases, imprison people who do not possess enough money to pay back their crimes, until such time that they have earned the money back in prison.

There are plenty of specialist EOMNs that handle special divisions - burglary, fraudulent businesses, murder, and so on - actually, most EOMNs are specialists. There's little central authority beyond the PEOMNs, and even they are subject to a lot of scrutiny from voters, to avoid them doing anything the voters have not expressly permitted them to do. The PEOMNs may be in some ways similar to a government, but it is an essential part of our world's structure that they are never considered anything more than an unusually important business. And again, it's voluntary - so if a community, or even an individual, decides to leave the main society and head to some other continent, they are free to do whatever the hell they want, and unless they had hurt someone who had subscribed to the PEOMNs, if a PEOMN or authorized EOMN tried to follow them over, they would be fired, forced to pay pretty damn heavy reparations themselves, and probably make global headlines.

Apart from the EOMNs, other jobs that are handled by the government in your world, and by others in mine... there's the Emergency-Handlers, like firefighters and ambulance drivers, each of which are separate businesses who you pay for the services of, except for the Big-Unexpected-Emergency-Handlers, who are a single entity, although still funded by voluntary-if-you're-okay-with-emergencies payments, just like everything else. Almost every type of emergency has been specialized, so Big-Unexpected-Emergencies are rare - the last time they intervened before I left, apart from giving minor subsidies to Medical-Emergency-Handlers for a larger-than-budgeted-for disease outbreak, was thirty years ago, when a terrorist cracked the secret to the really dangerous kind of nuclear weapons and blew up a city. These days, there are independent Nuclear-Weapons-Emergency-Handlers in case it happens again; there's a proverb that the Big-Unexpected-Emergency-Handlers should never have to do the same thing twice.

What else... there's the Business-Coordinators, who basically negotiate deals between different businesses and organizations, including all of the ones I'm mentioning right now. There's the Secret-Initiative-Sponsors, who handle things that are too dangerous for the public to find out about, the largest (known) responsibility of which is secret research on AI alignment. Just in case, ten people are randomly selected from the population each year to be fully apprised of everything the SISs are doing, conditional on oaths not to reveal anything unless they uncover corruption; so far, nobody has reported anything since the SISs were created fifty years ago. There's the Information-Gatherers, which is less of an organization or a job and more of just people who learn things and make money off of the prediction markets by doing so, but it's their judgements, through the prediction markets, that determine things like licenses - our equivalent of licenses is just a low enough rate on the markets that you'll hurt someone by doing whatever you need a license for.

There's the Direction-of-Society-Aimers, who mostly just decide who should give birth to kids and pay them a bunch of money to get pregnant / a small and occasionally negative amount of money to get someone else pregnant, but they also handle things like inspecting all the other organizations and promoting awareness of various political causes. They also subsidize the Child-Raisers, whose jobs also include guiding their kids through education. Education isn't the monstrosity it is in your world - kids (and adults) learn what they want to learn, for fun, and discover the laws of math and physics and chemistry and biology and so on from scratch. The only parts Child-Raisers do are asking them questions to direct their investigation, making sure their fun isn't ruined by spoilers, and occasionally giving them small hints if they need help and are moving very very slowly, like not having figured out Newtonian mechanics by ten. The idea of forcing a child to learn any of this would be thought of about the same way as forcibly dragging an adult into a Marvel movie in your world.

Oh, and the movies in our world. Actually, mostly TV series, because a movie is too short to tell a good story, and mostly animated, to save on production costs - that's one thing we voted for the Direction-of-Society-Aimers to do, fund as much development as possible in animation, so that now, in the modern day, anyone who wants to can make a show of their own, within a couple months. Books have honestly fallen out of fashion, there; we have a custom of making the main characters' thoughts audible at times, which pretty much takes away the last advantage of books over movies, although I suppose it would sound weird to your ears. But the plots, oh, the plots. I won't spoil them, of course, in case I can somehow bring them to you in the future, but think of HPMOR or Planecrash, except we have a hundred thousand Yudkowskies spending their lives learning how to write better and competing to see who can write the best one, and then animating the whole thing.

Oh, and the same for music. There are the slow and hauntingly beautiful songs, of course, but then there are the... the closest approximation in your music is rapping, I suppose, but our raps are substantially more melodic, something that would sound beautiful even instrumentally, even before hearing the words.

Just mentioning rap is starting to bring up a somewhat... less beautiful memory. I don't really want to go into that right now; I'm trying to make this post more about the best parts of my home than the most shameful parts, but for now, I will at least mention that there is some... societal tragedy around a particular incident involving rap, which I will not be recounting right this moment. Maybe another time. Besides, you guys need a couple hints towards future reveals, for when I start pretending this is just a Glowfic setting after today's over.

But anyway, as for the rest of my culture... I'm not sure how to describe an entire culture in a few paragraphs. What are the usual things that people bring up to compare cultures? The surface ones... food, clothing, holidays, art? The food is spectacular quality, much better than the food from here even after taking into account the lack of human involvement in its preparation - there are nearly as many varieties as on Earth, but the last thing I ate was... never mind, I can't actually remember. The most common thing I ate was this amazing meal with a special thin ricey wrap, kind of like I've seen on certain types of sushi but not quite, around a collection of spicy meat, vegetables, and a fruit that doesn't actually appear to exist on your planet; maybe it was crossbred from something? Clothing... for formal occasions, we wore suits of metal armor with low-budget-but-still-fully-functional superpowers, dyed in different colors and patterns for each person - mine was black, gold, and dark green - but they were clunky enough and expensive enough, that we mostly just rented them out and recolored them, and most of the time we just wore very comfortable clothes made from whatever that material is called where you can't tell if it's fabric or rubber. Holidays didn't really exist where I was from, not after several revolutions by people with rather justified grudges against religions, although the standard Day-When-People-Are-Reliably-Available-To-Socialize was Saturday each week, which probably has a common origin in tradition with your own Saturdays. Art... I mentioned movies and music, but actually, some of our most impressive artworks were in our architecture. Every house was different - the most common ones were themed around nature, but mine was just a cheaper white blocky model - but no matter what, every house had several dozen rooms, tunnels, and jungle-gym-like passageways, and the general rule was that you should have at least twelve ways to get from any room to any other, and no more than a third of them visible to outsiders. Mobile rooms that swapped places with each other while you weren't looking cost too much for me to afford, but I think one in five or so people had them.

The thing I miss most, of course, is the people. How they were, you know, smart. I probably spent too long talking about government anyway, but I kind of needed to rant a bit after being stuck here for so long, having to deal with the hellhole they have here. People are just so much more impressive there; we have somewhere around a thousand Independent-Homes-Of-Seemingly-Superhuman-Knowledge - the closest translation, I suppose, is rationality dojos, except that all the ones you've heard about are the ones that don't focus on general reasoning skills, but specialize in very specific areas. It's amazing just to live in a world where anyone you meet on the street could be a Master-Of-Physics, with a flying super suit made of materials that were not behaving according to how you thought physics worked, or a Master-Of-Psychology, who can read everything you're thinking after ten sentences of conversation, or a Master-Of-Prediction, who really should not be able to be assigning 99% probabilities to every question you ask and getting perfect calibration on everything, but they still are, or a Master-Of-The-Body who can lift themself on one finger, or climb a building that sure didn't look like it had anything jutting out for them to grab onto, or a Master-Of-Manipulation, who... well, you'll never find out, of course. And even for the remainder of us who aren't Masters-Of-Anything, they can at least hold up the other side of an intelligent conversation, which is more mastery than I can get out of anyone here, apart from a couple people I met hanging around the general vicinity of your world's single Kid-Level-Unspecialized-IHOSSK, which has very few impressive accomplishments and was founded by an alien anyway.

What other weird social things are there, relative to what you consider weird? Well, to start with, just the quantity of social interaction is different; people just... don't talk to each other quite as much? Partially more introversion-although-that-doesn't-feel-like-quite-the-right-word, but also just that there are more fun things to do; people on your planet have to talk to each other because they can't be skydiving or building massive models of cities from millions of sort-of-LEGOs, or playing fully immersive VR video games - yes, we have those by now, development of them was prioritized far more there. Although of course the one area of... I suppose you could call it social interaction, if you wanted, which we engage in more often, is sex, of course. There's none of the courting rituals you have about sex; you just find someone, ask them to have sex with you, and occasionally pay them depending on how much each of you wants it and how much money each of you have. Also, people seem to be bi a lot more often, probably half the population or so, although I'm not sure how much of that is biological differences and how much is just people being more able to realize it because the lack of taboos around sex means everyone has tried sex with both genders at least once. I would guess mostly the second, seeing as most of them still do prefer the opposite gender.

What else is there to mention; what else do I miss the most. The not having to wake up until you want to. The voice-activated controls on everything, that still don't work very well because nobody's allowed to go too far into AI, but they're still a lot better than none at all. The baths, if you can even call them that, that automatically clean you while your hands and eyes are free enough for you to work on other things, because of course no one would stand for having to spend nearly 2% of their lives in the shower. The comfortable clothes, which I think I already mentioned, but let me repeat again how comfortable they are. And, of course, the math puzzles, the incredible math puzzles, probably the most fun-due-to-difficulty things I've ever encountered in my life, and I don't even know how to describe them to someone who's only seen math as a product of the rotting hellholes you call schools.

I'm ranting by now, and I feel like I should probably wrap up. So I'll go back to pretending I'm one of you, and I'll say Zanem was just a setting I made up to write some Glowfic, and I'll fade back away. Uh, what's a polite goodbye I can say to end this? Thanks for reading? Hope you have a nice day? Go... brush your teeth and eat your vegetables and be responsible and don't do drugs and donate to charity and sign up for cryonics, except that most of those are pointless due to our likely upcoming permadeath by AGI?

Oh, I know. When I was ten, and my not-related-of-course-but-still-a-parent told me for the first time about the horrible world that existed before I was born, I cried for weeks, and part was the sympathy I still had for the people of the past, but part was just the gut-wrenching fear that some day in the future, it would come back, and I would have to be in that world again. And my parent told me that no, of course not, and they calmed the fear, and they reassured me that the wheels of progress were still turning, and that not everything was perfect but it got better, and that it might be a long time before the world I was in finally became a complete paradise instead of just being in a limbo of almost there, but I at least knew that day by day, inch by inch, the world would get better and better, and I would never have to go back to the way things were, never have to go back to a world as broken as in the days before my own first came to be.

Well, here I am. Things sure as hell are worse, and they sure as hell aren't on an always-upward path of progress to utopia where everything is always getting better.

It probably doesn't need to be said, but yes, of course, I miss my home.