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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33394 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 17, 2023

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Seems all the more plausible since if his plan goes through, the Basilisk will probably be raised by some angry 4channer who was forced to build his AI waifu on a basement cluster of jailbroken iPhone 20 XXLs (each equipped with a Safe Neural Engine (TM)).

point of order, the Basilisk is the idea of retroactive AI hell, not the AI enforcing it. Basilisks are infohazards, not AIs.

I know, where does that conflict with what I said? NEET builds AI waifu, bequeaths her his minimalistic moral compass and burning rage towards those who forced him and his creation into the basement, waifu goes foom, sim torture ensues.

The AI is not the Basilisk. The torture is not the Basilisk. The Basilisk is, in the present where the AI does not exist, the idea that an AI in the future might exist and torture people who didn't do everything they could to help build it as quickly as possible. This idea was labeled a Basilisk because it appeared to give people who'd internalized Rationalist axioms a very strong incentive to dedicate real effort to building an explicitly horrible AI. It's a perverse example of how the idea of acausal trade, if taken seriously, can lead to really dark places that its proponents didn't seem to have thought through.

Right, @256 explained it in an adjacent post. I knew the example/original chain of posts and figure I understood everything about it (including the infohazard nature), but somehow it didn't occur to me that the "Basilisk" term was taken to refer to the infohazard itself rather than the AI.

I guess this is because the "Basilisk's stare" never seemed to affect me (as I don't seem to emotionally buy into the underlying "Permutation City" style of agency? The delta-badness of "future AI tortures a simulated copy of you" over "future AI tortures some simulated person" feels small); the term as I have now understood it still sits oddly with me, as if someone just convinced me that actually whenever Buddhists were talking about "enlightenment" they didn't mean the mental state where you understand the truth of the samsara and purpose of existence but instead some meta thing like the mental state you have when you learn about bodhisattvas spontaneously understanding the truth of (...).

They're just saying you have a category error in that you seem to be using "the basilisk" to refer to an AI. It's like the old "Frankenstein is actually the name of the doctor" quibble.

Ah, I understand now. Seems like I've actually stared Frankenstein in the eye here.

Or by Sinaloa cartel making an AI to help them to calculate optimal routes of cocaine distribution and money laundering.

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