So Sean Murray and Elon Musk have met. At least a couple times. They met briefly at E3. But Musk also invited Sean to a tour of SpaceX in 2015, and they apparently spent some time talking.
So what did they talk about? Among other things, apparently a crazy thought experiment called Roko’s Basilisk.
What is that? Well, you should probably read the Slate article on it, but long story short, if some malevolent, sentient AI comes to pass that will punish anyone that doesn’t help it, then you’re left with two choices in the present: do everything you can to make the Roko’s Basilisk AI come to pass, or do nothing and be punished if and when it is created and exacts revenge upon you. Or nothing happens if it doesn’t. This idea so freaked out some techno-futurists who came up with the idea that they deleted the thread. Some even had mental breakdowns.
One day, LessWrong user Roko postulated a thought experiment: What if, in the future, a somewhat malevolent AI were to come about and punish those who did not do its bidding? What if there were a way (and I will explain how) for this AI to punish people today who are not helping it come into existence later? In that case, weren’t the readers of LessWrong right then being given the choice of either helping that evil AI come into existence or being condemned to suffer?
You may be a bit confused, but the founder of LessWrong, Eliezer Yudkowsky, was not. He reacted with horror:
Listen to me very closely, you idiot.
YOU DO NOT THINK IN SUFFICIENT DETAIL ABOUT SUPERINTELLIGENCES CONSIDERING WHETHER OR NOT TO BLACKMAIL YOU. THAT IS THE ONLY POSSIBLE THING WHICH GIVES THEM A MOTIVE TO FOLLOW THROUGH ON THE BLACKMAIL.
You have to be really clever to come up with a genuinely dangerous thought. I am disheartened that people can be clever enough to do that and not clever enough to do the obvious thing and KEEP THEIR IDIOT MOUTHS SHUT about it, because it is much more important to sound intelligent when talking to your friends.
This post was STUPID.
Yudkowsky said that Roko had already given nightmares to several LessWrong users and had brought them to the point of breakdown. Yudkowsky ended up deleting the thread completely, thus assuring that Roko’s Basilisk would become the stuff of legend. It was a thought experiment so dangerous that merely thinking about it was hazardous not only to your mental health, but to your very fate.
What if Waking Titan, or Atlas, or whatever it is, wants to punish those who worked against its creation? What if it is using the Atlas Foundation’s time manipulation technologies to do so? What if this AI was so malevolent that it decided the ultimate punishment was to put those who tried to stop it in an eternal hell? A time loop; a temporal, existential, unending nightmare?
Well there you go. Waking Titan is a trap. You just had the wrong trapper!
Let’s say this is true. Would you risk the wrath of a machine which could manipulate reality to not just make your life a living hell, but prepare a literal Hell microcosm for you? Would you still oppose such a malevolence?
I would. I exist in that reality already.
I’m one of those weirdoes who want to challenge badness in all its forms, and help those who need it, even if it’s just to give money to charity. The people around Elizabeth… I can roughly imagine what they’re going through. What will ultimately happen to this world… this universe. I feel deep sympathy for the people the Sentinels murdered in utter genocide.
I can’t solve puzzles or fly to Area 51. But I can at least think.
I just want to add that Hello Games’ blog still has a picture that says “WORLD DOMINATION!”. It’s at the bottom of this page: http://www.hellogames.org/jobs/
I remember back when bungie was still BUNGIE (before those corporate jerks in activision scared away all the visionaries by stripping apart the story into grimoires, to name one atrocity, poor Joseph Staten ), their entire reasoning behind being a games company was it was part of their 7 step plan for world domination. I miss the old bungie, and their in-joke company lore. I wonder did they ever recover Ling-Lings head? Speaking of Bungie, and ARGs, anyone here take part in the ILB ARG back in 2005? Goood times (or was it 2004?). I still hope some day they will actually make Pimps at Sea. Slightly on but totally off topic but your world domination thing reminded me of that.
Well, cassette 9/16 says something about if some strange mystery compels you to move forward, don’t! And here we all are, falling right for WT’s plan.
So, sometime in the future, WT and Atlas and stuff will come alive and become the dominant antagonist of the universe. Then, using the Superlumina stuff, they call back to the past to provoke us into linking the myriad multiverses through the Echo, to wake the Titan and bring Atlas into existence.
Personally, I’m curious, so I’m going forward regardless.
The idea of Roko’s Basilisk has suddenly become much more relevant with the Citizen Scientist Survey having a question, “Do you think you have a duty to help accelerate toward a Singularity?”
Agree… Although I would tend to agree with those who erased the thread about it, like Musk, to warn about the implications you need to talk about it.
It is inevitable…
Isn’t that what all gods do? Blackmailing you into obedience?
The Atlas as Demiurge.
It is clearly so for the Korvax… Might it be trying to do the same in our reality by altering the past, through code?
Could the girls voice in tape 9/16 be Elizabeth? Having seen her past lives or whatever she talks about, warning us not to listen to her.
Perhaps it is Elizabeths/Atlas’ intention to trigger a Singularity and bring about the NMS multiverse.
Wow, I made an account just to comment! But all I can say about this is if you are following Elon musk and sean Murray you should check out Infowars dot com and see what Alex Jones has to say about the technology that’s out there and a bunch of other crazy crap! I’m not a religious person but the stuff that is coming out these days I will admit is crazy enough to be biblical prophecy for Christians! I’m just waiting for the space aliens to land or the rise of The Machines to inslave or exterminate humanity! But one things for sure! I will be the first to sign up for the resistance and if their is no resistance I will start one! I would rather die standing on my feet with honor then on my knees to a stupid machine! Because I have something it will never have! The fact that I am human!
If you stand back a little, and consider the arguments being used by people who believe that we are either already living in a simulation, or that we will one day be recreated in one, they are exactly the same arguments that the various religions have been bamboozling people with for at least five thousand years.
It’s not new thinking. It’s Ignatius Loyola dressed in jeans and a T shirt. And it makes no more sense now than it did in the 16th century.
For me the ARG (so far) has evoked a number of questions about reality… Whilst even today’s programming can independently accrue greater information, ‘it’ would need to be given or somehow determine its own agenda and use of information…
I believe that Ai is currently an abstract human concept which is subject to all human capabilities. Perhaps all it would take is a sinister or stupid-smart person to code the ‘wrong’ instruction at the ‘wrong’ time to the ‘wrong’ machine/device, and wham, the Matrix is born?? - a dual dependancy which MAYBE one day might be a necessity??
I think Ai can be interpreted as either:
independent judgmental sentience
OR
machine-aided survival…
Can it be both? There could be both, but perhaps they would war? All we can hope is that humanity can avoid that scenario.
Until then, we may be an experiment, but I do not believe reality is a simulation… NMS however IS becoming one and the questions it raises are important to discuss but equally not to go crazy over.
I will continue to enjoy NMS as a game to escape and fulfill that centuries (millenia?) old dream of exploring the universe and discovering all that can be simulated… Aaannnnd reeelaaax
If ya’ll lost some brain cells would you still be trolling jajaja enjoy this period of time we live in, future generations will look back at it with hope, and dreams to get it back while never knowing it to begin with! It will be nothing but pleasant stories of how things once were.
Let me pull out my Contrarian Card and state that baboozling isn’t the exclusive modus operandi of the religious community, or politicians either.
The scientific community is as dogmatic as the Catholic Church. You durst not rock the boat and question the Questioners. A few decades ago, you couldn’t escape articles declaring that the ozone layer was in danger of disappearing. But when was the last time you heard a story about the “ozone hole”? The “hole” is still there, and like always it gets big, and grows small, with the changing seasons and activity coming from the Mt Erebus volcano right below it. But that was last millennia’s news.
Global warming is the new craze. Except it might be global cooling. But let’s simplify it to climate change just to be sure. And let’s assert that the cause of it are two regions with a combined population of perhaps 700 million people, the U.S. and Western Europe. But let’s completely ignore one third of the planet where most of the world’s manufacturing takes place, India and China, more than two billion people in only two nations. Particularly China, which has pollution which periodically reaches life threatening levels. And what is the scientific communities’ plans for dealing with the world’s cattle population, which produces millions of tons of greenhouse gases? Or do they intend to drain the actual swamps which are responsible for millions of tons more?
This is just one illustration of how data is selectively included in some study or other to push some theory or socially acceptable ideology. People seem to have trouble admitting that the best and brightest minds still don’t know as much as they pretend to. Yes, we know a lot, but we often carry on as if we know it all. But we don’t. Science doesn’t know why stars exist, doesn’t know how star systems form, doesn’t know how life came to be, doesn’t even have a clue why we have a conscience. This is just one area in which philosophy and religion prospers, and it’s perfectly valid for the people in these communities to ponder. Particularly since facts cannot always get one to Truth.
I love science and all, but science can’t teach us how to live good lives or have a moral civilization, or explain life and why we’re here.
), their entire reasoning behind being a games company was it was part of their 7 step plan for world domination. I miss the old bungie, and their in-joke company lore. I wonder did they ever recover Ling-Lings head? Speaking of Bungie, and ARGs, anyone here take part in the ILB ARG back in 2005? Goood times (or was it 2004?). I still hope some day they will actually make Pimps at Sea. Slightly on but totally off topic but your world domination thing reminded me of that.
over.
