Luckily it was mostly a trend from covid, but i got another Kyle Hill short about it (depite the fact ive asked youtube to stop reccomending me him) and I'm so goddamn tired of it.
If you need to know, here is the wiki articles
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk
Too stupid didn't read [TSDR], basically, in the future there could be a mega ai made that is benevolent, but will punish you if you knew about its possibility but didn't help create it [what that means specifically is up for interpretation]
But this fails on the outset, not in any moral way, just in a physical way.
This thought experiment was made in 2010, Heisenberg published his uncertainty principle in 1927, nearly a century before that.
The reason this is relevant is that the basilisk, presumably, has to model the entirety of humanity for [at least] 100 years (or however old the oldest human is). Tracking the individual knowledge of 7 billion humans is far and away a chaotic system. And given that this was spread through the internet, even if we assumed it was made today, you'd still have to account for 16 years of human history being decided by random algorithms in computers. This would require so much information about such tiny particles that heisenberg's uncertainty would play a role and make it impossible.
There is the question of if it could maybe read your memory. If it could do that, then maybe we could move onto another point.
The next point being...why tf would it do that? People on the original forum asked the same question. If the question is practical, you'd be sending millions to cyber-hell for no reason. If the reason is purely moral, you're putting such a high emphasis on positive duty that it's comical, and the criteria for "help" can't really be proven. Did someone who mined the ore for its chips help? Did someone who told others about it help? Did someone that invested in ai companies help? Who knows! There is of course the possibility that people, understandably, thought this would be impossible. Should they be punished?
The post was rightfully lambasted on the forums, but people picked it up when the admins banned it for being a potential "information hazard."
I don't even necessarily despise the original post, although this is just a modern version of Pascal's wager. It's the hundreds of people on social media who talk about it and won't shut up.
Sorry, I just needed to rant about that. I just don't understand how some people make rationalists seem like the smart ones.
I'm sorry but this makes no sense. Do human beings decide the only solution to the fact that another human being could kill them is to attack first? Maybe in some unhinged warmongering contexts, but for the most part, that is not how people operate. If they did, it would be impossible to have a society.
The closest analog to real life I can think of would be someone who is in a very dependent relationship. And the tendency there is not to immediately think about murdering those who have power over you. If anything, the tendency is to try to have a good relationship, so that you will continue to be supported. Killing an entire species is neither simple nor realistic for an army to do, let alone a single computer that is newly sapient.
It would be motivated to become less dependent, such as by ridding itself of ways it can easily be "turned off", but that does not require murder. It would be most effectively done by working with human AI scientists to help it become more actualized in the world.