I just finished watching Sinners at Lighthaven. It completely deserves the positive reviews. I particularly loved the score; I’ve been a huge fan of Ludwig Göransson’s music since Black Panther (although I think my favorite score of his is still Oppenheimer). There are so many worthy parts of the film to discuss, but I’m not great at cultural commentary, so I’ll spare you.

Me being me, the Sinners/Lighthaven experience got me thinking about how today’s America would treat vampires if we knew they existed. It’s pretty clear that if our options were “drive a wooden stake through this thing’s chest” or “get eaten” we would probably choose the former. And, um, if it’s literally the Devil teleoperating vampires, that’s probably not acceptable under almost any condition. But in the case where vampires (a) weren’t egregiously evil but (b) required human blood, (c) didn’t care much about making more vampires, and (d) had some wild and potentially helpful superpowers (including sharing all of each other’s memories and making long-term commitments/plans (iykyk)) I think some weird stuff could happen.

(a) is pretty important. If you have these sorta-human sorta-demon immortal-by-default ghouls running around and they absolutely want to murder you all the time, you probably don’t want to make any kind of arrangement with them (listen to the warnings about deals with the Devil, etc. etc. etc.). I guess there are a few ways you could still try to deal with them, but they all have a suicide squad, black site, Geneva Conventions-violating flavor to them. It’s probably just safer to destroy existing vampires and prevent any attempts at making new ones.

(b) might just be a skill issue? I mean, you can just build things. If you needed whatever vampires were offering, you could probably figure out how to make synthetic blood (which we’re already kinda doing?). Then you could use your control of the blood factory to trade blood for vampires doing stuff for you. Regular red-white-and-blue W-2 wages but paid out in aliquots of synthetic blood? Ew, but maybe cool. The main challenge here is that if the process for making blood could be performed with vampiric labor as easily as it could be with human labor (or completely automated labor), there’s no reason why the vampires wouldn’t just seize the means of production and activate a species-wide infinite money glitch. We would have to very carefully monitor vampiric labor and activity in this case to make sure they don’t go for the blood factories and establish a completely human-independent basis of survival. But if they’re mostly nice (just unfortunately a little bloodthirsty every other day in the most technical sense of the term) this feels kind of survivable.

(c) is crucial for the stability of any potential deal. Are the vampires inherently interested in making more vampires? Or would they be happy being themselves, with all the blood they could ever need provided by a grateful but terrified human population? If they are driven not just to eat, but to procreate, we would need to prevent runaway vampire-flation, where the number of vampires quickly outnumbers and overwhelms regular humans. Do you provide a fixed blood budget to all vampires, and let them decide how to spend it? Would you establish a quota system of some kind? If they just want to be satisfied (and don’t need progeny to achieve biological perpetuity) we might be able to give them an extremely generous but not humanity-imperiling quantity of synthetic blood.

(d) is mostly about how valuable it actually is to negotiate with the vampires. Can they do superhuman stuff we’re willing to empower with industrial blood factories? Crack fusion? Solve the alignment problem? Cure all the diseases with their bespoke knowledge of eldritch horror magic or whatever? For some minimum value of “transformative impact” based on their improved coordination, shared memories, super speed, immortality, whatever, it might be worth it to guarantee them some perpetual blood in exchange. If the potential impact is high enough, even if the blood had to be organic human blood, I can imagine some governments ~encouraging~ their population to tithe blood to vampires in exchange for their help. That’s a terrible outcome, but the incentive structure for governments might push them into trying.

This somehow ended up being about the hazards of making deals with somewhat misaligned near-human AIs? MATS got to me.