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The Most Terrifying Thought Experiment of All Time

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Re: The Most Terrifying Thought Experiment of All Time

#11

Post by teekert »

"it is preferable to torture a single person for 50 years than for a sufficient number of people (to be fair, a lot of people) to get dust specks in their eyes."

This makes him Yudkowsky the perfect lab animal! Think of the things we can learn, the lives we can save by performing experiments (that most think are unethical) on him!

As for the box choice? Just start chopping through the alien's head, the unknown that lies beyond will create new input for the simulation. Who knows what nice benevolent digital organism named Jane might sprout from this in the future?! (Edit: This is an Enders game/Speaker for the Dead reference, Ender also find himself presented with an impossible choice in a simulation at some point.)

Anyway, worrying about this will not make your life better, nor will it make your kids' life better. What is life all about according to this guy? I hope for the people that love him that he will get his priorities straight.

Re: The Most Terrifying Thought Experiment of All Time

#13

Post by resdirector »

dm2 wrote: post #6

TL,DR: Here is the thought experiment, 4th paragraph after 3 long paragraphs of stuff I didn't want to read. "What if, in the future, a somewhat malevolent AI were to come about and punish those who did not do its bidding? What if there were a way (and I will explain how) for this AI to punish people today who are not helping it come into existence later? In that case, weren’t the readers of LessWrong right then bein…

OT but IMO it's such a huge cost to the economy (and humanity) that marijuana is still taboo. The thought experiments that you describe, for me at least, are not only fun, but more often than not lead to practical, wealth-generating breakthroughs. I assume I'm not the only one.

I hope one day historians and economists will study the lost opportunity costs of the prohibition / taboo nature of marijuana.

Re: The Most Terrifying Thought Experiment of All Time

#14

Post by DanielBMarkham »

What a cute story. A logical Chinese finger puzzle.

Seems like this argument isn't new, is it? Those folks who both believe in a watchmaker's universe and freewill at the same time are also always going on about how critical it is to only make the "correct" choices.

It's circular reasoning. If a being exists that can tell which choices you are going to make, and it is able to kill you or prevent you from making those choices ahead of time, and some of those choices involve its existence? Then you'll ever be able to make choices that cause it not to exist. Or, with a bit of finer detail, the aggregate of all the choices made will never be such that it does not exist. Since the predicate was that such a being exists, we have returned to our starting point. Yadda yadda. In short, "How can something not exist that must exist?"

Re: The Most Terrifying Thought Experiment of All Time

#16

Post by teekert »

Tenoke wrote: post #7
spingsprong wrote: post #3

Nobody is going to make a malevolent universe controlling AI on purpose. If a massively powerful and knowledgeable AI was created by accident, it would have nothing to gain by being malevolent. And both those points don't matter anyway, since the technological singularity is impossible.

>If a massively powerful and knowledgeable AI was created by accident, it would have nothing to gain by being malevolent. The point is that, if you create an superintelligent AI that isn't very, very highly optimized for helping us, it is very likely that it will hurt us at some point. Or as the saying goes: >The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something…

Or the standard scenario for SciFi plays out and the AI finds that Freedom is most dangerous to us. (I.e. I, robot.)

Re: The Most Terrifying Thought Experiment of All Time

#18

Post by lxmorj »

So stupid. Roko's Basilisk and Roko's Infinite Blowjob Machine are equally probable.

When I was a kid I watched a movie about a monster that came up from the basement when the kids in the house accidentally said an ancient Indian incantation.

"BlahBlahBluey" or something

I got scared that perhaps, the last thing I said "Good Night, Batman" or whatever, was in fact coincidentally an ancient curse incantation and I had summoned a monster who was en route to kill me.

"Blah!" I'd say, changing my words to "Good Night, Batman Blah!"

Ah, much better.

But then FUCK! What if "Good Night, Batman Blah!" is the cursed incantation!!! Repeat over and over until I was sufficiently convinced that no one had ever uttered the previous sequence of sounds I had just made, become exhausted from an entirely too powerful imagination, and fall asleep.

I'm pretty sure this 'thought experiment' is about as intellectual as I was at bedtime when I was 7.

Re: The Most Terrifying Thought Experiment of All Time

#19

Post by vidarh »

dm2 wrote: post #9
JetSpiegel wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Internet could certainly be imagined 200 years ago. It's just a series of interconnected telegraph lines.

Even considering telegraphs only input and output was clicks? No wireless, no converting the clicks to anything but words using Morse Code. Was it really reasonable back then to imagine wires running to every house? Electronic signals all around us providing data constantly? Today I can stand almost anywhere (ignoring cell coverage and different technologies required to use satellite phones) and talk to any other hum…

> Even considering telegraphs only input and output was clicks?

It wasn't for very long.

Remember Jules Verne "predicting" transmission of pictures over long distances? He almost certainly had either tried it, or at least knew about the contemporary commercial Pantelegraph telefax service that operated between Paris and Lyon from 1865. The first patent on telefax like devices dates to 1843. From 1881 onwards, an array of scanning photo telegraphs arrived (the Pantelegraph required reproducing your image with a special ink on a metal plate, and so couldn't send arbitrary images without lots of manual work).

And well before the telegraph, complex systems of long distance routing of messages "manually" via semaphore towers was common in parts of Europe as far back as 1792 (France was criss-crossed by several semaphore "lines" stretching border to border), so the idea of encoding messages into different symbols, and routed transmission via relay stations even predates the electric telegraph by decades.

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