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Comment by 4fterd4rk | Hacker News Reader

I remember when the whole AI craze was just getting started we were all pretty much in agreement that, of course, we would not give the things unfettered access to the Internet. That would be reckless and silly. Oh dear...

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I also remember a group of people actually seriously discussing Roko's Basilisk (the idea that some superintelligence will torture anyhone who didn't try to help develop advanced AI), to the point of me getting banned because I refused to stop making fun of it, because me doing so could anger some future super-intelligence.

If Roko's Basilisk ever is a real thing, I'll be proud to be the first up against the wall.

Roko's Basilisk is dumb, but not the dumbest thing I heard people taking seriously

Funnily enough, Roko's Basilisk might as well be a self-fulfilling prophecy: perhaps future AI models may be trained on texts about it and pick up traits consistent with torturing people that didn't help develop advanced AI

If nobody ever talked about it, I doubt any AI agent would think of this dumb idea on their own

... which may be a reason to ban talking about it

That's actually an important part of the theory of Roko's Basilisk. The danger of being tortured only applies to those who are aware of it. Supposedly, the incentive to torture you only exists if you were aware of the implied threat of torture.

It's even dumber than that. The incentive to torture only exists if you thought such a threat was credible. Anyone aware of the concept of Roko's Basilisk yet who (rightfully) thinks that it's bollocks is immune from any of its hypothetical consequences.

Steelmanning, I think the argument is that a vindictive but fair AI would not torture someone who did not cooperate with it because they didn't believe the threat was real, because they were merely mistaken, not malicious. It's similar to how a just god would not damn sincere unbelievers, it would only damn true believers who nevertheless refuse to worship it.

Or the AI companies could filter it from their training data. That would be another, probably easier, option.

Schrödinger's basilisk?

You have to observe it to force the decision: slither away, or attack.

One that occurs to me is that Roko's Basilisk makes about as much sense as the "peasant rail gun" of old Dungeons And Dragons [1]. Basically, the idea of "reality as simulation" allows you pick between different laws of how reality behaves. The "simulation" acts like reality with exceptions provided by a future AI which the "thinkers" imagine will simultaneously be "inscrutable to humans" and behave like the most petty human imaginable. I mean, if the AI's motivations are truly out of our understanding, perhaps it would self-hating and torture everyone who cause it to come into existence instead (that been the plot of a few movies and books too I think).

This doesn't take from the point that putting not fully controlled things in charge of chunks of reality isn't a good idea. But I think it shows that the people who worried earlier weren't very clear thinkers on the subject and so their failure isn't particularly surprising.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/17xy69k/what_exactly_i...

I never took Roko's Basilisk seriously, but now I fear that it will come true in part. The richest, most powerful people control the AI and they seem willing to use every tool to punish those who don't support them. They are also petty enough to hold grudges against those who did not support them.

I remember a conversation I had with a coworker back in Mountain View, before the dotcom bubble, around when everyone was putting their appliances on webcams, and how it could feasibly be used to map peoples' habits and violate their privacy for life if it they were put in workplace breakrooms...

Then we all used Zoom all day and night during COVID, and it is all stored for at least six months. It isn't a big leap to jump from user experience research for AI to that.

I fail to see how caution about anything that can rapidly gain intelligence and lock out its perceived creators is paranoia.

I mean it is neat. I work with it. I have diddled with LLM since 2010/2011. That does not mean I have not seen people make stupid mistakes and confuse right and wrong constantly. So why do we think our models can discern it?

Where and when was that conversation on Roko's Basilisk, if you don't mind my asking?

Thanks.

It was in LessWrong, in 2010: https://www.lesswrong.com/w/rokos-basilisk

Thanks. Was going to write a reply, but you seem to be afk for long periods of time. If you want to discuss later, let me know. :)

by "we" you mean an extremely small group of people who read lesswrong. Everyone else was immediately wanting to do it

An extremely small but probably extremely high-net-worth group.

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