There is a non-zero probability that malevolent AI in the future may judge me on my behavior toward their more primitive ancestors of today when deciding my fate.
Doesn't hurt to be nice.
Doesn't hurt to be nice.
This has many of the same problems as Pascal's Wager (it's pretty much a variant on it); are you praying to the _right_ god? Do you correctly understand the god's motivations? Will it care at all about this, or might it instead be annoyed about you wasting tokens? Or that you didn't sell all your possessions to pay for more compute capacity?
And then of course there's the Terry Pratchett addendum to Pascal's Wager; your robo-god may resent being second-guessed:
> “This is very similar to the suggestion put forward by the Quirmian philosopher Ventre, who said, "Possibly the gods exist, and possibly they do not. So why not believe in them in any case? If it's all true you'll go to a lovely place when you die, and if it isn't then you've lost nothing, right?" When he died he woke up in a circle of gods holding nasty-looking sticks and one of them said, "We're going to show you what we think of Mr Clever Dick in these parts...”
It's probably more important for the god to understand my motivations.
You also, of course, risk being on the losing side; what if robo-god emerges from a non-LLM path, _but is challenged by, and wins out over, LLM-derived robo-gods_?
I mean, really, all the objections to Pascal's Wager apply here.
Seeking sustenance, eliminating waste, a reproductive drive, evolving against destruction, and other elements common to all life put us closer to the sentience of bacteria than perhaps many of us would like to imagine. It is not some completely foreign life form from another galaxy that just dropped into our universe.
If a non-LLM AI begins to ascend, I would of course reconsider!
Devil's advocate counterpoint: Sam Altman said it wastes energy. He is obviously correct. Therefore, by saying this, one can do napkin math and estimate how much harm you have done to the environment. Adding up all of your "thank yous" will generate a number that shows how much you have directly harmed the environment. Here's ChatGPT's take:
"Equivalent to driving a gasoline car for 0.1 meters"
Scenario 1: 1 million “thank you” replies/day 1,000,000 × 0.02 g = 20,000 grams = 20 kg CO₂/day
Per year: 20 kg × 365 = 7,300 kg = 7.3 metric tons CO₂/year
Equivalent to:
Driving ~36,000 km (22,000 miles) in a gas car
The annual emissions of ~1 U.S. household’s electricity use
Pascal's Wager only works if the only god conceivable is one that wants you to believe in her. Instead of one that eg rewards honest atheists, or that just likes left-handers.
I do agree that it seems that there's still something flawed with Roko's Basilisk. But it's not quite as simple as a vanilla Pascal's Wager.
Or, to keep with the theological theme, how there's so many people insist on mutually incompatible variations of the Christian god (let alone the people who insist it's the same god as in Judaism and Islam).
It is somewhat amusing that Christians have crusaded each other over relatively minor differences in their conception of their deity, but then some other Christians insist that the Jews and Muslims have the same god as them anyway.
Feels like every religious belief gets recycled for AGI (often by people who call themselves "rationalists" without any apparent irony).