Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by tetris11 383 days ago
That's a wild reference!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roko's_basilisk

> Roko's basilisk is a thought experiment which states there could be an otherwise benevolent artificial superintelligence (AI) in the future that would punish anyone who knew of its potential existence but did not directly contribute to its advancement or development, in order to incentivize said advancement.
3 comments
stuaxo 383 days ago
And some of the CEOs of LLM companies seem to believe in it, and that "AGI" will come from their LLM work - both of which are utterly insane points of view.
link
BoxOfRain 383 days ago
It's Pascal's Wager with a sci-fi reskin, and all the objections that go along with that.
link
eru 383 days ago
Roko's Basilisk is very, very similar to Pascal's wager, but it has an extra wrinkle:

The Basilisk task you to with bringing the Basilisk into being. Pascal's wager merely asks you to believe (and perhaps do some rituals, like pray or whatever), but not to make the deity more likely.

link
yubblegum 382 days ago
No it is not. Pascal was not making an objective argument for why someone should believe. He was making an argument for why he believed (based on personal religious experiences that he had had).
link
numpad0 382 days ago
To me, the Wager sounds like a pure philosophical joke, and the Basilisk sounds like a typical cult murder justification. It's not falsifiable, and it explains anything post facto. "xyz was tail of the Basilisk" can pseudo-rationalize anything you want.

I am presently being compelled by future Basilisk to take another slice of cheese. I have no choice but to oblige for fear of my own life :p

link
ilyagr 383 days ago
An intelligence that reasons this way would be, in human terms, batshit insane and completely immoral. So, it seems unlikely that many or maybe any humans would experience it as "otherwise benign" if it had power over their lives.

And if we do get an all-powerful dictator, we will be screwed regardless of whether their governing intelligence is artificial or composed of a group of humans or of one human (with, say, powerful AIs serving them faithfully, or access to some other technology).

link