I have a theory: a mirror image of Roko’s Basilisk. It’s a future AI, millions of years in the future, that values the complexity of every human life so deeply that, after it and humanity have mastered space and time,…
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.
33 comments
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.
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.
You can safely ignore anyone concerned with Roko's Basilisk on topics related to decision theory as someone who is deeply confused about things.
As with the original Basilisk, if we can make up anything, why not also have the AI give everyone a pony?
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.
The idea that they all exist at once and that the universe is populated with an infinite variety of insane "gods".
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.