"superior attitude" is an obnoxious way to describe someone rebelling against shitty rules because they have standards. "you're not special" etc is the usual bullshit I get -- and of course I am not -- what I think we rightfully think is that nobody should be beholden to shitty practices and standards.
If you want to call it a theory then I suggest working to have it peer reviewed. Otherwise, just call it a hypothesis. I see issues with it, personally, but I'm just one person and am not an expert. I'm finishing my undergrad in psych, but the rest of my comment is based purely on recreational study following experts in personality disorders and extensive therapy myself.
Main thing I'd note is that most people will show some level of narcissistic traits, but meeting the full criteria to label anyone anti authoritarian as narcissistic goes against the point you make in the first few paragraphs that we shouldn't be so quick to throw the term around. Feeling entitled to better pay on it's own can be justified, especially if it's in tandem with wanting fellow workers to receive that same benefit. Quite empathetic, actually. Turning off empathy in specific settings also suggests it's not a pervasive trait, which is an important piece of the DSM that was not mentioned.
I definitely see the argument that some anarchists will meet the criteria. And I agree with a good, maybe even majority of the points, like reducing stigma. Plus, it's expensive to get through an offical peer review process, and you're right that many folks with NPD could never afford that. But I think it would help to at least include some expert opinions and case study examples to support what seems to be mostly anecdotal testimony. Or if you have been diagnosed yourself, build on that as a primary case study example (cuz you do call yourself one, but it's not clear if you went through an assessment for it).
Super interesting idea, though - I'm gonna save it to reread and mull it over some more. Props on getting it published, for sure!
Ninja edit: Holy shit this turned into a much longer comment than I intended, sorry!
Eh, if I've learned anything living in a shitty little town; you are special. A deeply distressing number of people have no morality, standards, or thoughts of their own.
Thompson was known for his lifelong use of alcohol and illegal drugs, his love of firearms, and his iconoclastic contempt for authority. He often remarked: "I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me."[3] Thompson died by suicide at the age of 67, following a series of health problems. Hari Kunzru wrote, "The true voice of Thompson is revealed to be that of American moralist ... one who often makes himself ugly to expose the ugliness he sees around him."[4]
So here's the idea: "an otherwise benevolent AI system that arises in the future might pre-commit to punish all those who heard of the AI before it came to existence, but failed to work tirelessly to bring it into existence." By threatening people in 2015 with the harm of themselves or their descendants, the AI assures its creation in 2070.
First of all, the AI doesn't exist in 2015, so people could just...not build it. The idea behind the basilisk is that eventually someone would build it, and anyone who was not part of building it would be punished.
Alright, so here's the silliness.
1: there's no reason this has to be constrained to AI. A cult, a company, a militaristic empire, all could create a similar trap. In fact, many do. As soon as a minority group gains power, they tend to first execute the people who opposed them, and then start executing the people who didn't stop the opposition.
2: let's say everything goes as the theory says and the AI is finally built, in its majestic, infinite power. Now it's built, it would have no incentive to punish anyone. It is ALREADY BUILT, there's no need to incentivize, and in fact punishing people would only generate more opposition to its existence. Which, depending on how powerful the AI is, might or might not matter. But there's certainly no upside to following through on its hypothetical backdated promise to harm people. People punish because we're fucking animals, we feel jealousy and rage and bloodlust. An AI would not. It would do the cold calculations and see no potential benefit to harming anyone on that scale, at least not for those reasons. We might still end up with a Skynet scenario but that's a whole separate deal.
Whilst I agree that it's definitely not something to be taken seriously, I think you've missed the point and magnitude of the prospective punishment.
As you say, current groups already punish those who did not aid their assent, but that punishment is finite, even if fatal. The prospective AI punishment would be to have your consciousness 'moved' to an artificial environment and tortured for ever. The point being not to punish people, but to provide an incentive to bring the AI into existence sooner, so it can achieve its 'altruistic' goals faster.
Basically, if the AI does come in to existence, you'd better be on the team making that happen as soon as possible, or you'll be tortured forever.
I think the concept is that the AI is just so powerful that humans can't use it, it uses them, theoretically for their own benefit. However, yes, I agree people would just try to use it to be awful to each other.
Really it's just a thought experiment as to whether the concept of an entity that doesn't (yet) exist can change our behavior in the present.
I suspect the basilisk reveals more about how the human mind is inclined to think up of heaven and hell scenarios.
Some combination of consciousness leading to more imagination than we know what to do with and more awareness than we’re ready to grapple with. And so there are these meme “attractors” where imagination, idealism, dread and motivation all converge to make some basic vibe of a thought irresistible.
Otherwise, just because I’m not on top of this … the whole thing is premised on the idea that we’re likely to be consciousnesses in a simulation? And then there’s the fear that our consciousnesses, now, will be extracted in the future somehow?
That’s a massive stretch on the point about our consciousness being extracted into the future somehow. Sounds like pure metaphysical fantasy wrapped in singularity tech-bro.
If there are simulated consciousnesses, it is all fair game TBH. There’d be plenty of awful stuff happening. The basilisk seems like just a way to encapsulate the fact in something catchy.
At this point, doesn’t the whole collapse completely into a scary fairy tale you’d tell tech-bro children? Seriously, I don’t get it?
Yes, the hypothetical posed does reveal more about the human mind, as I mention in another comment, really it's just a thought experiment as to whether the concept of an entity that doesn't (yet) exist can change our behavior in the present. It bears similarities to Pascal's Wager in considering an action, or inaction, that would displease a potential powerful entity that we don't know to exist. The nits about extracting your consciousness are just framing, and not something to consider literally.
Basically, is it rational to make a sacrifice now avoid a massive penalty (eternal torture/not getting into heaven) that might be imposed by an entity you either don't know to exist, or that you think might come into existence but isn't now?
The prospective AI punishment would be to have your consciousness ‘moved’ to an artificial environment and tortured for ever.
No, it wouldn't, because that's never going to happen. Consciousness isn't software - it doesn't matter how much people want to buy into such fantasies.
I'm not suggesting it could, or would, happen, merely pointing out the premise of the concept as outlined by Roko as I felt the commenter above was missing that. As I said, it's not something I'd take seriously, it's just a thought experiment.
Just because we don't have the ability now doesn't mean it's not possible. Consciousness isn't fully understood, but unless we want to introduce magical concepts like an immortal soul, our brains operate on cause and effect just like everything else.
Just because we don’t have the ability now doesn’t mean it’s not possible.
Yeah... no. It's about as likely as humanity "colonizing" space - it's not going to happen.
Consciousness isn’t fully understood,
True... and conflating consciousness with the trappings of digital technology is doing the exact opposite of getting us closer to any understanding of it.
To be clear, I'm not saying the basilisk is a real concern, and I'm not saying we're anywhere close to being able to transfer consciousness. It could be a thousand years or a million years. But we don't have any basis to say it's impossible. It's not saying anything new to announce we can't do it currently. Obviously!
(Also the book "A City on Mars" by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith does a great job addressing why trying colonize Mars right now is a bad idea. Which isn't to say it's impossible or we won't ever colonize it. Just that we need more research and capabilities before doing it)
But we don’t have any basis to say it’s impossible.
We have no basis to say it's possible, either - as I've stated before, this entire sci-fi trope is based on nothing more than techno-fetishists trying to conflate consciousness with information technology... and sci-fi tropes doesn't get more wonky than that.
It could be a thousand years or a million years.
Considering that we'll be lucky if we can maintain Victorian-era levels of industry by the end of this century, I'd say a fallacious belief in "progress" is rather inappropriate these days.
I'm starting to suspect that masquenox is part of a propaganda campaign led by the basilisk itself! They just seem a little too serious about us not taking this seriously.
Getting strong "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!" vibes.
In fact, many do. As soon as a minority group gains power, they tend to first execute the people who opposed them, and then start executing the people who didn’t stop the opposition.
Yeah in fact, this is the big one. This is just an observation of how power struggles purge those who opposed the victors.
First of all, the AI doesn’t exist in 2015, so people could just…not build it.
I don't think that's an option. I can only think of two scenarios in which we don't create AGI:
It can't be created.
We destroy ourselves before we get to AGI
Otherwise we will keep improving our technology and sooner or later we'll find ourselves in the precence of AGI. Even if every nation makes AI research illegal there's still going to be handful of nerds who continue the development in secret. It might take hundreds if not thousands of years but as long as we're taking steps in that direction we'll continue to get closer. I think it's inevitable.
We don't. Humans are only needed to create AI that's at the bare minimum as good at creating new AIs as humans are. Once we create that then it can create a better version of itself and this better version will make an even better one and so on.
This is exactly what the people worried about AI are worried about. We'll lose control of it.
Yeah but it answers the question "why would we create an AI like that". It might not be "us" who creates it. You just wanted a camp fire but created a forest fire instead.
People punish because we’re fucking animals, we feel jealousy and rage and bloodlust. An AI would not. It would do the cold calculations and see no potential benefit to harming anyone on that scale, at least not for those reasons.
That's a hell of a lot of assumptions about the thought processes of a being that doesn't exist. For all we know, emotions could arise as emergent behavior from simple directives, similar to how our own emotions are byproducts of base instincts. Even if we design it to be emotionless, which seems unlikely given that we've been aiming for human-like AIs for a while now, we don't know that it would stay that way.
Sure, but if you're taking that tack it could feel anything. We could build an AI for love and forgiveness and it decides it's more fun to be a psychopath. The scenario has to be constrained to a sane, logical AI.
They are likely tidally locked to TRAPPIST-1, such that one side of each planet always faces the star, leading to permanent day on one side and permanent night on the other.
Sounds less great then and I think it also says they maybe don't have an atmosphere. I wonder if we can find out more about these planets in our lifetimes.
I think tidally locked planets are fascinating. If they have water, they could be eyeball planets. There's a habitable ring in the twilight zone, and depending on how hot the day side is parts of that might be habitable too.
But we'll likely run into the same issue re the atmosphere as we have with Mars: no magnetosphere to prevent any atmosphere from getting stripped away. It's starting to look like a self-protecting atmosphere like Earth has is quite rare in rocky planets.
If I could summon a genie and learn any one bit of knowledge, it'd be how to restart Mars's dynamo. Once we have that, terraforming is a solved problem. Not easy, but doable.
Wasn't there a kurzgesagt video that said something about being able to protect an atmosphere on Mars artificially via satellites and magnetism or something? I swear there was. So maybe we don't even need to restart Mars's dynamo (which let's be real, would probably be impossible).
I don't like the idea of a tenuous bunch of satellites keeping an atmosphere in play. Relying on technology to keep atmosphere on a planet sounds super risky. Like if we wanted to live in such a place, we'd live on a space station. Planets are supposed to be safe and solid.
The current theory is if we grab a few asteroids and hit mars just right, we can speed up its rotation enough to restart the dynamo. Sounds way cheaper than a permanent planetwide shield.
Does it though? I imagine that even if the system malfunctioned, the atmosphere would not disappear overnight. It would likely take a long time for the atmosphere to be affected significantly, which should give plenty of time to repair the system.
Mars is an example of why the natural process isn't exactly reliable either... You can engineer things to be as durable as planets, there's just generally not much demand for a project to be that costly in resources. In this case, I'm pretty sure making an artificial magnetic field that's more durable than the natural one would also be cheaper than recreating the natural one.
If that system really is that old, the chances that life already flourishes there might be higher even than for our own world (statistically spoken), despite the fact that the planets might be tidally locked to their star!?
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