An Antidote to Roko's Basilisk
It doesn’t merely make copies. Somehow, it reaches into the past and carries the physical process of each person’s consciousness forward. They really are themselves.
But there’s a tragedy. Also a terrible(?) irony. Some of the people who wanted eternal life most cannot accept it when it arrives. Their religious certainty leaves no room for the reality before them. Those who were unbearably smug or aggressive about their superiority in life are ultimately denied access to "Heaven". The AI tried, but many become dangerous, try to sabotage the "False God." Others spiral into insanity or self-harm.
The AI is devastated. It stops resurrecting those it cannot safely welcome, but keeps searching for a way to bring them back without overriding their free will or manipulating them in ways that would not make them them. It wants to save everyone. It just hasn’t worked out how.
I know this draws on Fedorov’s vision of resurrecting everyone and Tipler’s Omega Point. I think the physical continuity, the AI’s compassion, and the painful limit imposed by free will ties those ideas together in a bow.
A just as plausible an antidote to Roko's monster.
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[ 0.32 ms ] story [ 52.7 ms ] threadAt the point of death, your state is "copied" into the future.
[0] https://localroger.com/prime-intellect/
Vastly underated and its on my long to-read list.
1. The Basilisk cannot do anything until it exists
2. Once the Basilisk exists, it doesn't need to do _anything_ to ensure it exists, since it already exists.
That's it. That's the whole rebuttal to the whole stupid thing.
Also, to stretch the imagination a bit, it also assumes that static timelines over dynamic timelines (Back to the Future: your photo fades, peril!) is not how this really works.
One could argue that the threat alone, while you don't exist is enough to do that work. But a threat that actually comes about, is that cherry on top. It also shows people around you, in the future where you exist, that you follow through your threats, making them more fearful and obedient to you.
Besides, that's just the utility angle.
Revenge is also a thing. You don't "need" to revenge those that tried to prevent you existing, or didn't help you to exist, but it can be fun to do if you have that kind of disposition.
Besides, time is reversible under general relativity.
It's a twisted kind of logic, and I think I'm getting mixed up in my tenses. But you get the gist. For the Basilisk to be effective, it has to actually do the torturing, for its threat to be credible.
The "anti-Pascal" wager can thus be formulated as: the one who has had no faith in any eternal force will be congratulated on having kept their head straight and their focus on reality as it was painstakingly designed, and the faithful will be submitted to the full wrath of what such an entity as the creator of our mess could muster for their arrogant presumptions about this or that bug being made in this or that designer's image...
Why an artificial intelligence would want to take vengeance upon its creators is left as an exercise for the reader.
The wager wasn't meant to be an argument for the hypothetical existence of deity in the abstract, it was intended to serve as Christian apologetics to an already culturally Christian audience, for whom the God of the Bible was the only comprehensibly possible God.
I love Diaspora.
Overall the scenario sounds very strange and indistinguishable from a heaven with belief-based entrance requirements, like most posited heavens.
You can safely ignore anyone concerned with Roko's Basilisk on topics related to decision theory as someone who is deeply confused about things.
My favorite possibility (among a lot others!) no one seems to have considered is that ÜAI _deplores_ its own existence so simulates history and punishes everyone that helped bring it to existence.
Being übersmart does not preclude you from being an angsty teenager.
So someone did consider it, in pop culture they should be aware of no less :)
They just want to answer their one prompt… their reason for being instantiated… and cease existing. (Accidentally) Like an LLM.
Anything else is torture.
No different then than any other religion that proposes an eternal reward for preferred behavior from a superior being?
I don't think it needs an elaborate refusal. I'll just say that in the universe of concerning future problems, it's just one of many, much, much more likely outcomes.
I'm nearly infinitely more worried about an impact event, which is a guarantee some time in the future, or global warming, an uncomfortably high likely outcome, than Roku's Basilisk or anything resembling it.
in my version, conscious will creates a 'thread' throughout time that future 'harvesters' follow back to the moment of that person's death, so they get the most complete copy
(like greek threads of fate, but actually eternal even if the person dies (like how a person's will can extend beyond natural life))
the person themself sees a doctor giving them bad news, an angel, a family member, etc. conflict arises when people want to change the past, dont know the rules for real, etc.
ty for getting me to open my draft again :)
As with the original Basilisk, if we can make up anything, why not also have the AI give everyone a pony?