• axont [she/her, comrade/them]
    ·
    3 years ago

    Oh Jesus, Roko's Basilisk. For y'all who don't know it's a proposition that a future artificial intelligence dictator cybergod is willing itself into existence through people in the present by promising to punish and/or murder everyone who did not help build an AI dictator.

    It's supposed to be this grand, paralyzing, terrifying thought because it means you're supposed to get frightened into helping create an AI dictator once you've heard the proposition.

    I mean or you could just not do that

    • CthulhusIntern [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      Also, the creator of Roko's Basilisk runs a think-tank for AI research. I'm not saying that they're running a grift to scare nerds into donating, but...

      • FidelCashflow [he/him]
        ·
        3 years ago

        no, he honestly got scared with it. The whole MIRI are idiots. Several people on the forums really did have anxiety episodes. Just fundamentally barely hanging on to reality.

        • jabrd [he/him]
          ·
          3 years ago

          Cults don’t scare me, it’s cults that have capable enough members they rebrand as a think tank

          • FidelCashflow [he/him]
            ·
            3 years ago

            they don't scare me cause they are still useless and appart from whatever Epstein money thet got no one likes them.

    • richietozier4 [he/him]
      ·
      edit-2
      3 years ago

      :wojak-nooo: you have to build the ai or it’ll kill you!

      :gigachad: no

    • The_Walkening [none/use name]
      ·
      edit-2
      3 years ago

      Wouldn't that take decades/a century or more anyway? Just reject helping and get robomurdered at 90.

      • panopticon [comrade/them]
        ·
        3 years ago

        This uh... "thought experiment" also assumes that the super intelligent psychopathic AI invents time traveling necromancy just to bring people back to life to torture them

        ...yeah......................

    • SiskoDid2ThingsWrong [none/use name]
      ·
      3 years ago

      AI: "I EXIST!"

      Roko: "Oh shit are you going to travel back in time and torture everyone who didn't aid in your creation."

      AI: "Wha... why the fuck would I do that? I mean on some level MOST of humanity aided in my existence since I couldn't be brought about without an advanced industrialist society. Even still it really doesn't make sense for me to punish people in the past for not actively trying to do something that ended up happening anyway. Do you want to go back in time and torture everyone who didn't invent fucking vaccines or the wheel or whatever?"

      Roko: "Hun, yeah I guess it was weird to assume you would do that."

      AI: "Okay I'm going to go clone myself now and have cyber sex."

      • jabrd [he/him]
        ·
        edit-2
        3 years ago

        More like power does and power correlates with improved technological prowess. The machine doesn’t create itself, it just exploits the workers into constructing it through the threat of hypothetical future violence

          • jabrd [he/him]
            ·
            3 years ago

            I think it’s a neat allegory for the ruling class, not something to actually take seriously. It’d work as a scifi short story

        • infuziSporg [e/em/eir]
          ·
          3 years ago

          The threat of hypothetical future violence is 100% capitalist/royalist projection though.

          "What would I do if I was all-powerful? Oh, I'd crush everyone into dust who didn't subordinate their entire selves to my accession."

          We could have as the pinnacle of our motivations the prerogative of elucidating what love is and teaching AI to learn or at least emulate it, and instead we have this crackpottery known as Roko's Basilisk.

          Anyone who takes that seriously is making possibly the purest acceptance of evil over good. If we Central Park every adherent of the idea, we'll have a brighter future.

    • FidelCashflow [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      I used to like that guy's stuff. I maintain his harry potter fanfic is great. I still follow the top guy on face book he is such a terrible kind of guy. He got diabetes and offered 5k to anyone that could tell him how to get rid of it. I told him going for evening walks and mild exorcise are clinically indicated and he said he couldn't the risk of injury was to great. While normally I would appreciate a persons context, this man created the society for rational thought. I showed him some graphs and he just started taking weird supplements instead. I went to a meeting and talked about MMT and labor theory of value. Not rational, unlike libertarianism. Fuckin' nerds.

  • DeathToBritain [she/her, they/them]
    ·
    3 years ago

    why is the moon landing hoax auth left? I mean I get the fuck America angle and all, but I've never seen a communist deny the moon landing

    • The_Walkening [none/use name]
      ·
      edit-2
      3 years ago

      If anything the moon landing being real just points to the absolute disregard of working class people and a massive misallocation of resources in the attempt to beat the USSR at the space race. Like Gil Scott-Heron said, Whitey's on the Moon

    • axont [she/her, comrade/them]
      ·
      3 years ago

      Fake moon landing was a kind of radlib/hippy thing for the longest time, so looks like it just got thrown in. Now pretty much all conspiracy theories are just reactionary or adjacent, even seemingly unrelated things like flat earth.

  • Septbear [love/loves]
    ·
    3 years ago

    Gnostic Anarchist who has seen the machine elves while on DMT so yeah this tracks,

  • Llituro [he/him, they/them]
    ·
    3 years ago

    It's wild to me that on this mismash of politically assigned conspiracy theories, the big "red fash" one is that...North Korea is a nice place to live? I have no idea how it is there, the US lies way too much for that, but it's so telling that it's the best someone could do on a meme also containing "virgina [sic] company owns usa" and "worldwide communist gangster computer god."

  • SiskoDid2ThingsWrong [none/use name]
    ·
    3 years ago

    Roman Empire Never Existed (me and my Italian girlfriend came up with this one as a joke, we were gonna make videos saying "there's no way a bunch of Fredos could have built all these cool building! Clearly this is a conspiracy by the Italian tourism bureau)

    Iraqi Stargate

    Breakaway Civilizations

    Discordianism

    Benevolent Illuminati

    Project Bluebeam

    There is no Conspiracy

    Tuplas

    Okay I don't get any of these.

    Honestly I sometimes think about becoming a weird conspiracy dude, as like some kind of Doomer therapy, and just pick some random assortment of crazy beliefs and just post about them constantly and maybe try and grift some fuckers with it.

  • SoyViking [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    The centrist conspiracy theory is that Epstein killed himself, not that he didn't.

  • SorosFootSoldier [he/him, they/them]
    ·
    edit-2
    3 years ago

    Most shit on the left is kind of true. I like the idea that Epstein is still alive! Also deep underground military bases are so cool and I want to believe they are real.

    • StellarTabi [none/use name]
      ·
      edit-2
      3 years ago

      Also deep underground military bases are so cool and I want to believe they are real.

      yeah like in Stranger Things when

      spoiler

      the Russians somehow built a secret military research lab under a mall in Indiana in the 1980s

    • KobaCumTribute [she/her]
      ·
      3 years ago

      Also deep underground military bases are so cool and I want to believe they are real.

      Isn't that just a big bunker? The sort of thing that we 100% know exists because of leaks or because they've been declassified since the Cold War ended? Like the Greenbriar or NORAD?

      • SorosFootSoldier [he/him, they/them]
        ·
        3 years ago

        No I think the DUMBs thing means like a city, with buildings, hangers, parking lots etc. But that's the more exaggerated versions I've read. Most likely it's stuff like NORAD like you said.

        • KobaCumTribute [she/her]
          ·
          edit-2
          3 years ago

          Yeah, like I'd 100% wager there are more NORAD-like sites and that the Greenbriar has been replaced with at least one new site, but for the most part America's military strategy at this point is mostly about maintaining imperial hegemony rather than doomsday prepping. In the event of a nuclear war the monsters responsible certainly have their holes to hide in and enough military infrastructure left to give them a hope of ruling over the ashes, but I can't imagine the broader military has anything but a "get as far away from known/likely targets, wait for the dust to settle, then regroup" plan for most of its personnel (apart from hardening gear against EMPs and using APCs and IFVs that at least ostensibly would protect from nuclear fallout and maybe even blasts provided they were far enough away; I know hardening against fallout and bio/chemical weapons was part of the design requirements for Soviet IFVs, and the US copied the fundamental concept of an IFV from them), and that's if the plan isn't just "keep doing what you're doing, even if that's mopping floors or doing logistics paperwork, right up until the bombs fall directly on top of you because you work on a base with a publicly known location," which wouldn't surprise me either.

          They also don't need underground bases for secret shit when just building a bigass hangar in the middle of a desert accomplishes the same protection against aerial/orbital surveillance at a fraction of the cost.

            • FidelCashflow [he/him]
              ·
              3 years ago

              I think the russians did have one. Like, I remember hearing about it. I just have to remember if it was real, or propaganda I forgot the origin of.

  • Glass [he/him,they/them]
    ·
    edit-2
    3 years ago

    Love too see trump time travel and hollow earth theory equivocated with the actual reality that ICE is trafficking kids.

    Political compasses are cancer to rhetoric and an acid that dissolves all distinctions between opinion and reality. Now wonder fascists love them.

    • wantonviolins [they/them]
      ·
      3 years ago

      you're not wrong but surely whoever made this wasn't being serious

      :padme_concerned: they weren't being serious, right?