What If We Could Have A Future?

Maybe you have heard of Roko's Basilisk. This is a thought experiment, for lack of a better term, popular among a certain set: hyper-rationalists, futurists, effective altruists. Tech-industry guys. You get the idea. The most exhausting humans who ever lived, that is to say. People who at present happen to command a critical share of the world economy. If you're not familiar with it, Roko's Basilisk, in broad terms, supposes that at some point in the future a sentient and omnipotent artificial intelligence could arise, and that this intelligence could then decide to punish all those who had anticipated its possible arrival and either worked to prevent it or refused to participate in its development. In that case, the wise course of action for people now, who are aware of even the theoretical possibility of this scenario, would be to work in good faith to bring this A.I. into existence, lest they put themselves or their descendants in its future crosshairs. I have been thinking about Roko's Basilisk this week. The occasion was a pair of engineers at the Anthropic artificial intelligence company taking to Twitter, as A.I. exponents regularly, exhaustingly do, to warn, as one of them put it, that "the people building A.I. earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade." The other guy was even more strenuous about it: "We really do earnestly believe A.I. could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade."

Read it at Defector ↗

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