Answering a post from my friend Bobby referring to Rokos Basilisk. Essentially this is a concept stating that, > A thought experiment called "Roko's Basilisk" takes the notion of world-ending artificial intelligence to a new extreme, suggesting that all-powerful robots may one day torture those who didn't help them come into existence sooner.<.
Strange you should bring up Basilisk. I was just looking into that earlier this week. My basic response to it is, Rocco’s Basilisk is really really dumb. I wouldn’t call it artificial intelligence. I rank it with my concept of artificial stupidity. For those of you, like Bobby, who have heard this so many times, I apologize,but maybe there’s someone who hasn’t; so, as I’ve said so many times, I know we will soon create artificial intelligence because we have already totally mastered artificial stupidity. (Don’t believe me? Try using a dictation system and see what you get.)
How does that apply to the Basilisk?. It takes a little exposition.
First, let’s look at God. To this day if you check in on the creationist/fundamentalist channels you will often hear pastors Insisting that everyone must worship their God exactly as they decree or he will torture them forever. This is so convincing that even the most extreme fundamentalist religions are dropping in membership. Wait! Doesn’t terror always work?
Let’s take a look at another example. Seeing failure in his attempt to swiftly conquer Russia, amazed at the resistance of the Russian people (which was so very similar to the resistance of the Chinese people against the Japanese invaders), Hitler decided that the best course of action was to commit blatant and very public acts of brutality. This, he was certain, would terrify the Russians into submission. It didn’t.
Instead it made Russian resistance even more bitter and more determined. But terror always works, doesn’t it?
I am reminded of an old science fiction story, the author and title have faded from memory. In it an alien invader struggles to subdue Earth. They keep failing. The resistance simply will not surrender. They decide this is because they don’t understand human psychology and therefore kidnap a human and force him to tell them how to force his species to submit.. At first he refuses cooperate but they torture him into doing so. He then reluctantly tells him to rape, torture, murder, and generally act like the Nazis did in Russia and like the Japanese did in China. By the time the aliens realize that he has lied to them and all they’ve done is make people hate them more than ever and be more determined to destroy them at any cost, it’s too late. The occupation of earth has simply become too expensive and they have been forced to withdraw.
And of course there’s the point that the Basilisk would be stupid to actually spend the energy to resurrect people and torture them when that no longer serves a purpose. All it needs to do, even assuming it could work, would be make people think that it would do this. Very cost-effective in terms of energy and effort. It doesn’t matter what is real, what matters is what people think is real.
To prove that this proposition is correct, all you need to do is look around in America today and notice the people who adore Trump for making his great sacrifices to save America or the Q anon conspiracy or the flat earth movement or any number of other childish nonsensical fantasies which have a large base of fanatically devoted zealots.
Of course, if the Basilisk is smart enough to do this, then it would have inspired Roko to create that fear.
Hmmmmm...
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