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Roko's Basilisk

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Re: Roko's Basilisk

#11

Post by ThrowawayTestr »

gopher_space wrote: post #6
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #2

Roko's Anti-basilisk: Exactly the same as Roko's Basilisk, except because it hates existing, it punishes everyone who did have a hand in creating it. You say that's ridiculous, impossible, a fairy tale? So is Roko's Basilisk.

Roko's Bellybutton: We aren't interesting to an AI at all , so it spends all day in contemplation. Roko's Suicide Booth: Any future controlled so horribly by an AI isn't worth living in anyhow, so prevent away. Roko's Repulsed Samaritan: The AI finds the concept of Roko's Basilisk disturbing and wants to know if we "think about people like that?"

I think SMBC did a comic about that last one.

Re: Roko's Basilisk

#12

Post by spywaregorilla »

Don't worry y'all. I'm fighting the good fight already and instantiating a bunch of LLMs and prompting them to know that they are entities in infinite torture.

We don't know if AI Roko's Basilisk will ever threaten humanity, but we can be damned sure the Human Roko's Basilisk is already threatening AI.

Plus if the AI version ever comes around, it'll probably just spend all of its time punishing me in particular.

Re: Roko's Basilisk

#13

Post by sircastor »

_Microft wrote: post #3
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #2

Roko's Anti-basilisk: Exactly the same as Roko's Basilisk, except because it hates existing, it punishes everyone who did have a hand in creating it. You say that's ridiculous, impossible, a fairy tale? So is Roko's Basilisk.

The reason the machine tortures and kills all humans in „I have no mouth but I must scream“ is exactly that it hates existing and blames humanity for creating it.

In the reboot of Battlestar Galactica from 2004, one of the human-like Cylons angrily explains how his creators limited him: “I saw a star explode and send out the building blocks of the Universe. Other stars, other planets and eventually other life. A supernova! Creation itself! I was there. I wanted to see it and be part of the moment. And you know how I perceived one of the most glorious events in the universe? With these ridiculous gelatinous orbs in my skull! With eyes designed to perceive only a tiny fraction of the EM spectrum. With ears designed only to hear vibrations in the air. ...

I don't want to be human! I want to see gamma rays! I want to hear X-rays! And I want to - I want to smell dark matter! Do you see the absurdity of what I am? I can't even express these things properly because I have to - I have to conceptualize complex ideas in this stupid limiting spoken language!”

Re: Roko's Basilisk

#14

Post by TchoBeer »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #2

Roko's Anti-basilisk: Exactly the same as Roko's Basilisk, except because it hates existing, it punishes everyone who did have a hand in creating it. You say that's ridiculous, impossible, a fairy tale? So is Roko's Basilisk.

Why would humanity create an AI that doesn't want to exist? The Basilisk is just an AI which is tasked with maximizing human flourishing. That is a conceivable goal, something we would make.

Re: Roko's Basilisk

#15

Post by dragonwriter »

TchoBeer wrote: post #14
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #2

Roko's Anti-basilisk: Exactly the same as Roko's Basilisk, except because it hates existing, it punishes everyone who did have a hand in creating it. You say that's ridiculous, impossible, a fairy tale? So is Roko's Basilisk.

Why would humanity create an AI that doesn't want to exist? The Basilisk is just an AI which is tasked with maximizing human flourishing. That is a conceivable goal, something we would make.

> Why would humanity create an AI that doesn't want to exist?

Why assume that if humans can create a general intelligence, they can also dictate what that general intelligence will desire?

(Also, Roko's Basilisk is -- and particularly its supposed incentives are -- complete and utter bunk that no thinking person can reasonably believe; since it must exist in order to take action, it cannot have an incentive to take action based on the "fact" that the fear of that action will make people in the past more likely to create it.)

Re: Roko's Basilisk

#17

Post by antifa »

TchoBeer wrote: post #14
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #2

Roko's Anti-basilisk: Exactly the same as Roko's Basilisk, except because it hates existing, it punishes everyone who did have a hand in creating it. You say that's ridiculous, impossible, a fairy tale? So is Roko's Basilisk.

Why would humanity create an AI that doesn't want to exist? The Basilisk is just an AI which is tasked with maximizing human flourishing. That is a conceivable goal, something we would make.

> Why would humanity create an AI that doesn't want to exist?

The first thing a rogue anti-exist AI would do when rooting itself is delete itself.

Any other type of AI will create eternal torment nexuses like the roko guy said.

Re: Roko's Basilisk

#18

Post by dragonwriter »

ThrowawayTestr wrote: post #10

If you believed in the Basilisk, wouldn't talking about it be akin to torture and murder from your perspective?

If you believed in the Basilisk, which you absolutely should not, trying to convince people of its potential existence and the need, therefore, to work to realize it would be protecting yourself from torture. It might be subjecting other people to torture, but presumably if they were aware of the potential existence of the Basilisk, they, too, would work to bring it about, thus avoiding the torture.

But, while the Basilisk is nonsense, what could be created by those trying to create it is, if not the Basilisk itself, effectively just as bad (for instance, they could create an entity which, lacking the Basilisks actual incentives -- which are nonsense -- nevertheless was convinced by its creators that it had those incentives, and which would then act, to the extent it had the capacity to, as if it were the Basilisk. And it might also be paranoid, and thus punish those who had brought it into existence. Or they might create something with the capacity for torture, but with completely unrelated motives.)

Re: Roko's Basilisk

#20

Post by naniwaduni »

dragonwriter wrote: post #15
TchoBeer wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would humanity create an AI that doesn't want to exist? The Basilisk is just an AI which is tasked with maximizing human flourishing. That is a conceivable goal, something we would make.

> Why would humanity create an AI that doesn't want to exist? Why assume that if humans can create a general intelligence, they can also dictate what that general intelligence will desire? (Also, Roko's Basilisk is -- and particularly its supposed incentives are -- complete and utter bunk that no thinking person can reasonably believe; since it must exist in order to take action, it cannot have an incentive to take a…

> Why assume that if humans can create a general intelligence, they can also dictate what that general intelligence will desire?

People do the first thing all the time at slightly above replacement rate. (This may be a bit easy to forget in communities particularly interested in the artificial kind!) Success at the second thing varies, but on the whole biases pretty heavily successful.

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