Permanently Deleted

  • Frank [he/him, he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    I would strongly suggest don't. Generations of Christian theologist pedants didn't waste their lives arguing about how many angles could dance on the head of a pin for us to start taking bs like that seriously again.

    • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
      ·
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      The joke of Roko's Basilisk is how quickly it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The nut of the idea isn't even unique to AI. Its just a new twist on an old "We have to kill them before they kill us" theme.

      As soon as you extrapolate the idea out to rival populations, you're not just dealing with "The Roko's Basilisk", but "China's Basilisk versus America's Basilisk" with the subtext that one of us has to build it first before the other unleashes it on us. Its in the same vein as turn-of-the-20th-century racists insisting that White Slavery is just around the corner if black people get too rich or too well-enfranchised. Or anti-migrant xenophobes who believe The Illegals Are Stealing Our Jobs. Or the drug warriors who insist cartels will take over the country if we're not constantly fighting to criminalize drug use. Or the Nuclear Arms Race.

      Roko's Basilisk is another incarnation of the proto-Hobbseian belief in a war of All Against All. It isn't something we will build so much as something we've been building in various flavors and styles since the nation was founded.

      • Frank [he/him, he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        This is a big part of the metaplot of Ecplise Phase. No one is entirely sure what happened that caused the TITAN AIs to go rogue and bring about The Fall and the destruction of 90% of transhumanity, but one of the theories is that the USA's AIs were given free-reign to self-improve in order to counter China's super-AI project and things went very, very badly.