Author: The Conversation / Source: The Next Web
A reptile of legend recently reared its head. The basilisk is a fabled serpent king who, according to European bestiaries, can cause death with a single glance. Its most recent incarnation, however, looks to the technological future rather than the mythological past.
Roko’s Basilisk is a thought experiment that first appeared on the artificial intelligence discussion board LessWrong about ten years ago and was named after Roko, the user who posted the conundrum. It also, bizarrely, was the spark that brought tech entrepreneur Elon Musk and the musician Grimes together.
What, Roko asked, should we do if we are certain that artificial intelligence will reach what is known as “the singularity” and become self-aware and ultimately all-powerful? If we help such a being into existence we guarantee our obsolescence, but if we don’t, the all-powerful AI might punish us for eternity.
The founder of LessWrong, Eliezer Yudkowsky, was unhappy with Roko’s post. He considered the thought experiment an information hazard, a risk arising from the dissemination of (true) information:
Listen to me very closely, you idiot … You have to be really clever to come up with a genuinely dangerous thought. I am disheartened that people can be clever enough to do that and not clever enough to do the obvious thing and KEEP THEIR IDIOT MOUTHS SHUT about it, because it is much more important to sound intelligent when talking to your friends. This post was STUPID.
One of the reasons that Roko’s Basilisk inspired such particular ire was the possibility of being blackmailed by such a future superintelligence.
A ‘terrifying’ thought experiment
The reason for this can be found in another thought experiment, Newcomb’s Paradox, a hypothetical problem created by physicist William Newcomb in 1960, that played a part in modern game theory.
In the paradox, a predictor who knows the future (someone with a time machine, or a supercomputer, say) already knows the decision a player will make when asked to choose between two boxes that contain a lot of money, some money or no money, and has placed…
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