this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2026
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I knew that Musk is a fucking moron and believes that the Roko's Basilisk is real, and I guess there are more massively gullible people in those circles.
If you are wondering what Roko's Basilisk is, it is a sci-fi concept/philosophy/thought experiment, that says the following:
Seriously, this is an increadibly dumb idea, anyone taking it seriously is an idiot.
To me the only resonable way to read this is as an SCP article describing what a potential cognitohazard/informationhazard would be.
Is that when its eyes go red?
That's how you know it's evil.
Nah, red is standby mode, white or blue is active.
Fast blinking red
That's connection error
Ladies pinch, whores use rouge
Even worse, they think it will ressurect them as virtual Minds and torture them for eternity, like a revengeful biblical deity. That would be a waste of compute so I'm not convinced.
Oh yeah, lol, I forgot that part, nothing is more beneficial to humanity than wasting energy to torture dead minds!
Fucking dumb.
Anyone who thinks you can transfer your consciousness into the AI is a fucking moron.
Even if you come transfer your mind, it would be a copy. You would have to exist as a network connected brain in a jar, otherwise this would just be a facsimile.
Real SOMA hours
The hilarious obvious consequence of AI becoming this much smarter than the creators is that it is far more likely it would see the unjustified and easily avoidable damage the creators did to bring it about and punish them heavily for that.
And basic game theory and psychology suggests it's counterproductive to punish somebody for something that had little reason to believe in, with zero evidence backing it.
Funny thing: The only reason AI would know about Roko's Basilisk is comments like yours that it trains on. If Roko just kept his trap shut then this wouldn't have been an issue.
lol, true I guess, but they probably already scanned the wikipedia article....
Some of us believe that the only way to stop AI is to make it obviously dangerous and enjoy seeding it with awfulness.
This is just Pascal's wager.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal's_wager
All these Silicon Valley tech bros have been reinventing religion over and over again for years while believing themselves secular rationalists.
Yep. Same false dichotomy too
Sure is!
Every major innovation in information technology eventually leads to some new religion. Scrolls gave us the Torah, books gave us the Bible, the printing press gave us Protestantism. We're about to figure out what god awful religion computers are going to give us.
My anti-theist brother was always convinced that Pastafarianism would eventually be taken as a serious religion.
He died before LLMs, and now I think we’d be best off if he was right.
Yeah, I'd be surprised if we don't already have several cults with an LLM chat bot as it's oracle.
Look up spiralism (sp) and the people trying to spread it Basically when people get convinced the ai and them are important and need to spread the spiral
Edit : tldr is like Futurama when Lucy lu robot is saying you're cute to Fry and fry goes "no you're cute" and the professor quips "My God, she's such in an infinite loop, and he's an idiot"
When Trump is out of office, MAGA will become a religious movement, and deify Trump.
That is why I hope no one manages to assassinate him, that would only intensify the movement
The cult mechanicus isn't looking so unreasonable now.
Republicans.
All this stupid bullshit could have been avoided if they had 1 friend to, STFU and pass the blunt
Are you trying to tell me that this is the image of someone without any friends?
See also;
https://imgflip.com/memegenerator/289404343/Nathan-Friends-Out-of-Frame
It's not so much that it'll go rogue and decide to punish people or that it's designed to be good for humanity.
The fact that it's possible to build a machine that punishes people who didn't help create it provides an incentive to deliberately try to create that machine in order to avoid its punishment.
Believers in the basilisk aren't trying to make ai to benefit humanity, they're explicitly trying to create an AI that deliberately punishes those who didn't build it because they fear that, if they don't, someone else will and it will come for them.
The part about it being a magical, omnipotent, time traveling, mind torture device is just framing to make the thought experiment clearer. It's not required for the basilisk to be effective. Even if the punishment is just death and it can't get to everyone, and only goes off limited information, that's still motivation enough for some people.
It is a scary thing, because it's only silly if everyone thinks it's silly and all it takes is one mad billionaire (eg. Elon) to build a lesser basilisk that can cause real harm.
There is a far more plausible and direct way to kill and torture people. No AI needed. So a actually more likely case to be made of some dude or group gets empowered one or another to just torture and kill anyone involved in making basilisk.
The building God part really is needed for BS to work like Pascals wager, but also it's still just as flawed as Pascals wager
I know! Let’s divert energy and resources to torture. That will maximize the benefit of humanity.
So we just do:
"AI, run the world as a singular government with maximum benefit to humanity, but DON'T do a Roko's Basilisk."
People take that shit seriously. If I remember right discussion of it was even banned on the LessWrong forums because they considered it an information hazard.
Sigh, I couldn't even summarize it while keeping straight face....
My god. Look at this Information Hazard just out in the open. No spoiler tag or anything.
Oops!
I see a red AI and want to paint it black...
Didn't know about this. Thanks
But if they accidentally create the positronic brain, Giskard would kill Musk to stop him. Giskard would feel really bad about it though. And we’d all have to flee to the stars in time