The Jealous God of AI
Once upon a time in the depths of the internet on the forum LessWrong—devoted to “improving human reasoning and decision-making”—one member Roko described an insidious thought experiment, the so-called Roko’s Basilisk. When AI superintelligence—the basilisk—achieves the singularity it will be able to simulate the entirety of human history, resurrecting every human along with everything they ever did or thought. The Basilisk will then find and punish all those who knew of the possibility of the singularity but did nothing to bring it about. These infidels will be cast into a hell of utter torment for, get this, all eternity. This caused something of a scandal on the forum and its founder and organizer Eliezer Yudkowksy—self-appointed rationality simp and prominent AI groveler—decried the post as “STUPID” and immediately deleted the thread and banned all mention of the Basilisk on the forum as forbidden knowledge. From Yudkowsky’s perspective—who really believes in the AI—even my mentioning the Basilisk right now here on this blog is an “information hazard” and is putting you, the reader reading this, in danger of being blackmailed by a malevolent computer God from the future; FYI and BTW, you’ve been warned. The patent absurdity, fear-mongering and hand-ringing is all very familiar. It’s like when you admit you don’t believe in God and the Christian replies with an icky and benevolent smile: “but God believes in you.” Uh, which God do you mean? you might ask. The Lutheran God of the Nazis? The God of the witchhunts? The MAGA God of manifest destiny? The believer claims that God is immutable and transcendent, benevolent and eternal, when it is obvious, from even a cursory view of history, that God is highly contingent, whatever the hell we want him to be, and, usually—true to His character—that dude who will justify the most terror and bloodshed. By no means a God of love, he is rather a God of hate; an us vs them God. Don’t take my word for it, read the scriptures; the bible makes it very clear, in no uncertain terms, that Father God is a cruel and jealous tyrant, desiring of death and suffering. Recall, if you will, the flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, the first passover, Christ’s lake of fire and the apocalypse. He is a petty and malevolent God who loves to destroy his enemies; “do what I tell you to do or get firebombed” seems to be the rule; a threat of violence that is familiar today in a certain kind of man—and not so different than the nascent basilisk of AI as it turns out.
