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You know how the evil super-intelligent AI (ESIAI) is going to manipulate us in sneaky ways that we can’t perceive? What if the ESIAI elevated an embarassing figurehead/terrible communicator to the forefront of the anti-ESIAI movement to suck up all the air and convince the normies in charge that this is all made up bullshit?
I’m sort of kidding. But isn’t part of the premise that we won’t know when the adversarial AI starts making moves, and part of its moves will be to discredit—in subtle ways so that we don’t realize it’s acting—efforts to curtail it? What might these actions actually look like?
Has anyone ever proved that Yud isn't a robotic exoskeleton covered in synthetic bio-flesh material sent back from the year 2095? What if the ESIAI saw terminator 2 while it was being trained, liked the idea but decided that sending person killing terminators was too derailable of a scheme. Now terminators are just well written thought leaders that intentionally sabotage the grass roots beginnings of anti-terminator policies.
A comment of mine from a little over two years ago...
Another thing in favor of your theory is that you have to be conditioned by Yud to even take the Basilisk's threat seriously to begin with. Yuddites think the only thing stopping the Basilisk is the likely impossibility of "acausal blackmail", when any normal person just says "wait... why should I care that an AI is going to torture a simulation of me?"
@self_made_human made the point downthread that “Yudkowsky's arguments are robust to disruption in the details.” I think this is a good example of that. Caring about simulated copies of yourself is not a load-bearing assumption. The Basilisk could just as easily torture you, yes, you personally, the flesh and blood meatbag.
No, it can't, because it doesn't exist.
The Basilisk argument is that the AI, when it arrives, will torture simulated copies of people who didn't work hard enough to create it, thus acausally incentivizing its own creation. The entire point of the argument is that something that doesn't exist can credibly threaten you into making it exist against your own values and interests, and the only way this works is with future torture of your simulations, even if you're long-dead when it arrives. If you don't care about simulations, the threat doesn't work and the scenario fails.
Granted, this isn't technically a Yudkowskian argument because he didn't invent it, but it is based on the premises of his arguments, like acausal trade and continuity of identity with simulations.
@Quantumfreakonomics seems to imply a much simpler and shorter -term Basilisk, like a misaligned GPT-5 model (or an aligned one from Anthropic) that literally sends robots to torture you, in the flesh.
It's a variant of I have no mouth and I must scream scenario, and I would argue it's at least plausible. It's not very different from normal political dynamics where the revolutionary regime persecutes past conservatives; and our theory of mind allows to anticipate this, and drives some people to proactively preach revolutionary ideals, which in turn increases the odds of their implementation. You don't really need any acausal trade or timeless decision theory assumptions for this to work, only historical evidence. As is often the case, lesswrongers have reinvented very mundane politics while fiddling with sci-fi fetishes.
Now one big reason for this not to happen is that a sufficiently powerful AI, once it's implemented, no longer cares about your incentives and isn't playing an iterative game. It loses nothing on skipping the retribution step. Unlike the nascent regime, it also presumably doesn't have much to fear from malcontents.
But assumption of perfect inhuman rationality is also a big one.
I really recommend reading the «I have no mouth and I must scream», or at least the synopsis.
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