what is Roko’s Basilisk?
In: 8
Kyle Hill did a good video on this on youtube. It’s a hypothetical evil future AI. It seeks to torture anyone who knew about the possibility of its existence but did not actively work to bring it into existence. The idea being that once you learn about it, it’s in your best interests to work on bringing it into being. Because if you don’t, someone else might, and it’ll try to punish you for not helping build it.
It’s a thought experiment: The concept that an hypothetical AI in the future might want to decide to take revenge on anybody who didn’t try to bring it into existence. Which theoretically would be an incentive for us to work to create such a thing.
Eg, in the Terminator, Skynet eventually shows up one way or another. This thought experiment says Skynet then may proceed to enact grisly revenge on anybody who opposed its existence, or even just didn’t work towards it. So we should try and create Skynet, lest it shows up in our lifetime and is angry at us for not doing it faster.
Of course there’s the logical question of why would it care. Regardless of when Skynet shows up, it can’t make itself happen faster retroactively, so from its point of view this would be a waste of time.
I think it’s a pretty silly idea. Imagine that say, Bill Gates hires you for a huge amount of money, and you decide to beat him up because you’re 40 now, and would have much preferred to be hired back when you became 18.
What it is is that you’ve just doomed yourself by asking this question and reading the answer. The only thing that could protect yourself from it would be not knowing what it is. You can’t purposefully help bring along its creation if you’ve never heard about it. By now reading the other answers in here explaining what it is you now have the choice of helping bring about its creation or risking the consequences of not.
You’ve also doomed everyone who will come in here who doesn’t already know about it.
I hope you’re happy!
PS. This is actually an extra explanation of what the others have already said. The only protection against it (apart from it never existing) is being ignorant of it.
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