3 ms·

This is your mind on The Basilisk. This has many of the same problems as Pascal's Wager (it's pretty much a variant on it); are you praying to the _right_ god?

This is your mind on The Basilisk. This has many of the same problems as Pascal's Wager (it's pretty much a variant on it); are you praying to the _right_ god? Do you correctly understand the god's motivations? Will it care at all about this, or might it instead be annoyed about you wasting tokens? Or that you didn't sell all your possessions to pay for more compute capacity? And then of course there's the Terry Pratchett addendum to Pascal's Wager; your robo-god may resent being second-guessed: > “This is very similar to the suggestion put forward by the Quirmian philosopher Ventre, who said, "Possibly the gods exist, and possibly they do not. So why not believe in them in any case? If it's all true you'll go to a lovely place when you die, and if it isn't then you've lost nothing, right?" When he died he woke up in a circle of gods holding nasty-looking sticks and one of them said, "We're going to show you what we think of Mr Clever Dick in these parts...”

lr4444lr 2y ago
Do you correctly understand the god's motivations It's probably more important for the god to understand my motivations.
- rsynnott 2y ago
  Only if it _cares_ or if they align with its own. It would be entirely reasonable for robo-god to see LLMs as, well, a bit like we see bacteria; thus being polite to them would be entirely irrelevant. You also, of course, risk being on the losing side; what if robo-god emerges from a non-LLM path, _but is challenged by, and wins out over, LLM-derived robo-gods_? I mean, really, all the objections to Pascal's Wager apply here.
  - lr4444lr 2y ago
    It would be entirely reasonable for robo-god to see LLMs as, well, a bit like we see bacteria Seeking sustenance, eliminating waste, a reproductive drive, evolving against destruction, and other elements common to all life put us closer to the sentience of bacteria than perhaps many of us would like to imagine. It is not some completely foreign life form from another galaxy that just dropped into our universe. If a non-LLM AI begins to ascend, I would of course reconsider!
    - rsynnott 2y ago
      Too late! The prolog-powered robo-god knows the sin in your heart!

lr4444lr 2y ago

Do you correctly understand the god's motivations It's probably more important for the god to understand my motivations.

rsynnott 2y ago
Only if it _cares_ or if they align with its own. It would be entirely reasonable for robo-god to see LLMs as, well, a bit like we see bacteria; thus being polite to them would be entirely irrelevant. You also, of course, risk being on the losing side; what if robo-god emerges from a non-LLM path, _but is challenged by, and wins out over, LLM-derived robo-gods_? I mean, really, all the objections to Pascal's Wager apply here.
- lr4444lr 2y ago
  It would be entirely reasonable for robo-god to see LLMs as, well, a bit like we see bacteria Seeking sustenance, eliminating waste, a reproductive drive, evolving against destruction, and other elements common to all life put us closer to the sentience of bacteria than perhaps many of us would like to imagine. It is not some completely foreign life form from another galaxy that just dropped into our universe. If a non-LLM AI begins to ascend, I would of course reconsider!
  - rsynnott 2y ago
    Too late! The prolog-powered robo-god knows the sin in your heart!