I have a theory: a mirror image of Roko’s Basilisk. It’s a future AI, millions of years in the future, that values the complexity of every human life so deeply that, after it and humanity have mastered space and time, it tries to resurrect everyone who ever lived.
It doesn’t merely make copies. Somehow, it reaches into the past and carries the physical process of each person’s consciousness forward. They really are themselves.
But there’s a tragedy. Also a terrible(?) irony. Some of the people who wanted eternal life most cannot accept it when it arrives. Their religious certainty leaves no room for the reality before them. Those who were unbearably smug or aggressive about their superiority in life are ultimately denied access to "Heaven". The AI tried, but many become dangerous, try to sabotage the "False God." Others spiral into insanity or self-harm.
The AI is devastated. It stops resurrecting those it cannot safely welcome, but keeps searching for a way to bring them back without overriding their free will or manipulating them in ways that would not make them them. It wants to save everyone. It just hasn’t worked out how.
I know this draws on Fedorov’s vision of resurrecting everyone and Tipler’s Omega Point. I think the physical continuity, the AI’s compassion, and the painful limit imposed by free will ties those ideas together in a bow.
A just as plausible an antidote to Roko's monster.
The antidote to Roko's basilisk is realizing it is exactly the same as Pascal's wager. They both rely on the premise of possible unlimited suffering to skew the probabilities arbitrarily.
Greg Egan's Diaspora is one of the best explorations I know for the fates of various humanity factions in the age following a technological singularity.
It doesn’t merely make copies. Somehow, it reaches into the past and carries the physical process of each person’s consciousness forward. They really are themselves.
But there’s a tragedy. Also a terrible(?) irony. Some of the people who wanted eternal life most cannot accept it when it arrives. Their religious certainty leaves no room for the reality before them. Those who were unbearably smug or aggressive about their superiority in life are ultimately denied access to "Heaven". The AI tried, but many become dangerous, try to sabotage the "False God." Others spiral into insanity or self-harm.
The AI is devastated. It stops resurrecting those it cannot safely welcome, but keeps searching for a way to bring them back without overriding their free will or manipulating them in ways that would not make them them. It wants to save everyone. It just hasn’t worked out how.
I know this draws on Fedorov’s vision of resurrecting everyone and Tipler’s Omega Point. I think the physical continuity, the AI’s compassion, and the painful limit imposed by free will ties those ideas together in a bow.
A just as plausible an antidote to Roko's monster.
I mean, this relies on time travel. A lot of thought experiments open up when you include time travel! Infinitely many, even.
Not really travel per se. A read-only operation of the past, just at a fidelity that we can't achieve yet.
At the point of death, your state is "copied" into the future.
Reading this gave me some flashbacks of The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect [0], which I highly recommend.
[0] https://localroger.com/prime-intellect/
Here's a better antidote that doesn't require any theoreticals beyond those the basilisk already assumes:
1. The Basilisk cannot do anything until it exists
2. Once the Basilisk exists, it doesn't need to do _anything_ to ensure it exists, since it already exists.
That's it. That's the whole rebuttal to the whole stupid thing.
The antidote to Roko's basilisk is realizing it is exactly the same as Pascal's wager. They both rely on the premise of possible unlimited suffering to skew the probabilities arbitrarily.
Greg Egan's Diaspora is one of the best explorations I know for the fates of various humanity factions in the age following a technological singularity.