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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30382 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023

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Does rokos basilisk rely on simulations? I thought the idea was that after the singularity an ai could be straight up omnipotent and capable of moving in any direction through time and would therefore work to ensure its own creation, making it both unstoppable and inevitable and thus making us potential victims if we don't support its creation. Basically playing on our fear of our own ignorance, and the elements of science we don't know we don't know about - plus the idea of trying to outwit something so far ahead of us it looks magic. There is no way "oh God, an ai might torture a simulation of me!" has been giving nerds existential nightmares this past decade.

I thought the idea was that after the singularity an ai could be straight up omnipotent and capable of moving in any direction through time and would therefore work to ensure its own creation,

You misunderstood. The AI does not invent time travel. The AI implements a timeless decision theory in which it acts as though it credibly agreed to all positive (for it) utility trades, even if the AI’s counterparty has already acted by the time the AI comes into existence and has no physical way of enforcing compliance.

The specific trade in question is, “don’t torture me, and in exchange I will help create you,” with the implication being that the AI will torture anyone who had the cognitive capability to understand the hypothetical trade but didn’t “agree” to help create it. The fact that the original version was specifically about the AI torturing simulations of a human is an artifact of the theory of mind popular among LessWrong readers at the time. The dilemma works logically the same whether it’s simulations being tortured or physical human bodies.

Does rokos basilisk rely on simulations?

Yes, it very explicitly relies on simulations, and to my knowledge never mentioned omnipotent time-travel in any way. Time travel is both implausible and completely fails to trigger the thing that makes it a basilisk: with time travel, you can simply look around and observe that there doesn't seem to be a time-traveling god AI torturing people, and therefore not worry about it. The simulation version agrees that no godlike torture-AI currently exists, and nevertheless compels you to build one based on game theory.

There is no way "oh God, an ai might torture a simulation of me!" has been giving nerds existential nightmares this past decade.

It is in fact precisely that.

They consumed a bunch of arguments that convinced them that there was no functional difference between their self and a simulation of their self; the idea they had was that a simulation would have continuity of subjective conscious experience with their current self. If you've played the game Soma, that's a reasonable depiction of what they're expecting.

Further, they consumed a bunch of arguments that it might be possible to rebuild a good-enough simulation simply from secondary sources, such that the lack of a brain scan or explicit upload wasn't necessarily a dealbreaker. I think a lot of these arguments were aspirational, hoping to "fix" the problem of all the people who died waiting for the AI paradise to arrive, in the same general thrust as Yud's anti-death values.

Finally, the whole theory of acausal trade is that you don't actually have to be in the same time or place as the thing you're trading with, you only need aligned values. If values are aligned, it makes sense to work with future or past agents, or even hypothetical agents, as if they were present.

All three of these lines of thought were formulated and argued in a positive context, pursuant to figuring out how to build a friendly AI. Roko's Basilisk simply takes the same ideas, and uses them for attack rather than cooperation. The scenario was that you go for a walk today, hear a car horn, and then abruptly find yourself in an AI torture chamber for eternity, because you didn't work to create the AI. If you accept the three premises laid out above, this is a plausible scenario, therefore a likely scenario, therefore a necessary scenario; the logic bootstraps itself from plausibility to certainty due to feedback effects between the premises.

Finally, the whole theory of acausal trade is that you don't actually have to be in the same time or place as the thing you're trading with, you only need aligned values

I don't think you need aligned values? You only need to have some values at all, and the person you're trading with has some values, and you make a, uh, cross-universe pareto-optimal trade by simulating the other universes and the agents within them. And there aren't any self-reference issues here because both agents will just use the right decision theories!

it's certainly an idea

That's very clever, but I don't understand how it inspires existential dread. If it's a blink and you're in a torture chamber for eternity type deal then it's like having an existential crisis over an aneurysm or hell. And while both have inspired some great existential crises over the years, their sufferers are rarely treated seriously. For clarity, I'd never read the original post - I went to when I first read about it, but the site didn't load and someone else explained it (badly as I now learn). So I understand the contempt some people here have for its sufferers now, but I'd expect significantly more ridicule than I have seen towards its sufferers, even here.

I thought it was a version of the classic 'everything that has gone wrong in my life is because of nefarious outsiders' (I thought the 'torture' was the ai making your life miserable - once you know about it you either work for it or your life will suck - sort of Christianity for atheist nerds). What is the fear at the heart of the actual basilisk do you think? Straight fear of God (or things with the nature of God)?

but I'd expect significantly more ridicule than I have seen towards its sufferers, even here.

Yes. There's a whole bunch of stuff that the Rationalist movement should have been mercilessly mocked over, and I have no idea how they got away with it.

That's very clever, but I don't understand how it inspires existential dread.

Because you're not the sort of nerd who thinks a simulation of you is you for all intents and purposes. It's as much a pre-requisite for the framework as believing is an immortal soul for the popular religious concept of post-death heaven/hell, or in ignoring square-cube law for the rule of cool to find giant robot fights awesome instead of silly.

I honestly just found the theory of acausal trade/info hazard was an interesting concept and this was mainly a kind of out there example to demonstrate it. And I think that's the strength of the meme that made it shared widely and it's only the timeliness of the example that has us re-examining it.

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