RE: Roko's Basilisk (Read Warning In Post First)
February 20, 2018 at 11:09 pm
(This post was last modified: February 20, 2018 at 11:12 pm by GrandizerII.)
(February 20, 2018 at 11:00 pm)Rev. Rye Wrote: I read RW too, and found the article on Roko's Basilisk. It's a strange tale of what ideology can do to a person's brain, modeled in a very strange, but very real, way. It's so bizarre to even imagine that we can actually reach a point in our AI (outside of a sci-fi story) that we can create a super-intelligent computer that can recreate a person exactly, which would be the exact same as you, and such a super-intelligence would like to do nothing more than torture this exact copy of you for not bringing it into being.
And watching Black Mirror has made this even more implausible for me, since (at least) three episodes include "cookies," which are exact copies of a person extracted by computer, which frequently get tortured, but even then, as they're perceived as having the same feelings as humans, even if the powers that be don't bother to treat them like it, even then there's still a distinction between what's happening to the original person and what's happening to the cookie.
Sadly, I can't find a video of the whole segment which properly contrasts what happened with Cookie!Greta and Real!Greta, so here's the clip of Cookie!Greta doing her work, already broken as Real!Greta goes about her day.
And I think continuity (or at least as far as Planck's length allows!) plays a good role in the identity of self. When simulation/cloning occurs, there is a split there between the two selves so that one self goes along its own continuous path while the other on its own different continuous path in life. So they're not only two different bodies and brains, but reasonably two different selves.
The other thing I forgot to mention is that an AI as intelligent as the Basilisk should see no rational reason to torture simulated copies of the original beings who won't be affected by the torture in any tangible way. I think.
