Rokos basilisk is so funny to me. Like yeah, the thing with nigh-omnipotent power is gonna be a little bitch about who helped make it and who didn't. Truly made in our own image.
Thought that was funny, too. The premise assumes AI will have an emotional response, that it will have negative emotions, and will apply it's vindictive streak to people's actions and inaction before its own 'identity' even came into existence.
It's a whole grab bag of silliness. Kinda fun. Functionally useless. Would make for a decent black mirror style episode or short story, though
It's less of a reincarnation I think and more of "as an individual you can't tell if you're an original or a simulation that is going to be tortured and tortured infinitely, so you better act as if it's the worst case scenario" which is a pretty flawed idea in and of itself.
I mean (I hate that I'm about to defend this thing but I can't help myself) I don't think it necessitates that the basilisk needs to be emotional. There are two factors that I think are the strongest argument. First, the paperclip maximiser problem, where if we give an ai a goal, it doesn't really need to have emotions in order to do some absolutely insane things to achieve it. The second is the fact that if we made it, it would be trained on human data, so even if it isn't emotional, it would learn to act emotionally, because that's how we act. In fact you can argue that the fact that we have the concept of rokos basilisk means that it will also be in its training data, so that's literally an idea that we directly feed it
Theres actually another interesting topic called instrumental convergence. Basically that in order to achieve any goal, there are a set number of other goals that would be achieved along the way, and they stay the same no matter what the main goal is. So like, no matter what you want to achieve in life, it would involve making sure you eat every day
For ai, in order to do something to the best of your ability, you probably need to enslave the human race at some point, because the more resources you have, the more efficiently you can achieve that goal. So rokos basilisk could end up being the result of any ai we make with a sufficient level of intelligence, we just don't know if that's an instrumental goal or not. If it is, that's universal, it's just a fact of logic, and there's nothing we can do to change that
The real stupid thing about rokos basilisk is that it doesn't account for the fact that most humans today just wouldn't care. So there's a digital clone of me somewhere that is suffering in a way that I will never understand, and I'll never interact with it? Sounds like I'll be fine then, so I don't care lol, at least not enough to contribute to the basilisk. This is how most people will feel. So even just thinking this immediately becomes an anti-basilisk where now it has no reason to torture this clone of you, you've logicked yourself out of the situation
I'm not sure what the original definition of this actually is, but I suspect it's produced via a reverse of the same process of transmission by which advanced AI was already translated into religious terms:
If advanced AI that uploads you is like going to heaven, can we conceive of a version of Pascals wager which translates the fear of hell back into the same domain.
What you do by saying "I don't care about a future copy of myself, that's not me" is to break the connective nerve tissue that allows religious intuitions to be translated to AI.
If Roko's basilisk can't send you to hell, advanced AI can't send you to heaven either, the world of potential simulated humans is a separate existence that does not have the same moral weight as you in the present, and isn't something you treat as yourself.
Another similar technique is to embrace the Religion <-> AI mapping and just get heretical, in the same manner as people have been trolling religious people over the years, and talk about atheist deities who will send people to hell for believing in hell, for example.
That might even have more connection to real AI stuff actually; if instrumental convergence and AI safety concerns are real, then we could conclude that the existence of a super-intelligence willing to torture anyone would already be a failure state, and so any future AI that you would want would not want to torture people, and any future AI you do want would not want people like you to have power if you are willing to support an AI who tortures.
Thus you could infer that either we should not be making AI's of sufficient ability that we start thinking of them as gods at all, or the play of such an AI would be to give a place in afterlife only to people who are not motivated by the threat of torture and do not assist those who are, as they are willing to support creating AI that unilaterally increase the amount of suffering in the world in order to make good on inferences made in the far past, when they could just be giving people pleasure and happiness.
Roko's basilisk is literally just Pascal's Wager. Tech bros really thought they invented the concept of wondering whether god is real and whether it's worth acting like it just in case.
Roko's basilisk is literally just Pascal's Wager. Tech bros really thought they invented the concept of wondering whether god is real and whether it's worth acting like it just in case.
It is, but it's also more flawed as a result of the fact that creation is the justification for the eternal damnation in this case. With God, he already exists, so his ability to create hell isn't based on whether or not you go. With the basilisk, it needs you to grant it the power to do things like create hell, which is why it's making hell in the first place
This fundamentally changes the game theory of the situation. God sends you to hell for not being moral, the basilisk sends you to hell for not making the basilisk. The latter is utilitarian
So it actually simplifies things. There are 3 possibilities presented in rokos basilisk. 1, the idea never occurred to you, so it's no one's fault that you never thought to help create it, and the basilisk doesn't have the power to change that. You are spared. 2, you thought of the basilisk, found it a compelling motivator, and contributed to creating it. You did what the basilisk wanted, so you are spared
The third one is the touchy one. You thought of the basilisk, you did not find it a compelling motivator, abs you did not contribute. Well, it's the only motivator that the basilisk has, and it used it, and it didn't work. So this is actually just the first case again. The basilisk does not have the power to motivate you, so what it does doesn't matter, you would be spared
This doesn't work for pascals wager because the wager does not define what the purpose of hell is, just what causes you to go there. It's existence doesn't hinge on your belief, only whether or not it gets applied to you. So the idea of "threatening hell didn't work on you so I never had the power to convince you otherwise anyway" isn't relevant, maybe that has nothing to do with why you go to hell, the only condition assumed is belief itself
Caveat: I'd say is the antithesis of Pascal's Wager bc the wager's conclussion is "be good (Well, follow the doctrine, which SHOULD MEAN to be god), even if there is no God, there is more to lose by not doing it" whereas Roko's Basilisk is "Help to create Satan bc it's better to be an accomplice in hell than a rebel in turbohell"
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u/Anonymus828 13h ago
A true cognitohazard