Pascall’s Wager and Roco’s Basilisk
You’ve probably heard of the entities above. If not — read this note, because tomorrow afternoon I’ll publish another one about Roco’s Basilisk, which I think intersects with it quite nicely.
So: once upon a time, in the 17th century, Pascal proposed an answer to the question “should you believe in God?” Decision theory came to Pascal’s aid:
If you don’t believe in God, you may enjoy some finite savings compared to believing.
If you do believe in God, then with some probability Q you might incur costs and receive infinite bliss, and with probability 1−Q you incur costs and get ZERO.
So if Q>0, it’s obvious that you should believe in God — because for a finite cost you get a chance at infinite happiness.
In the 21st century the wager got a retelling: imagine that someday a godlike malevolent artificial intelligence will be created — an all-powerful, malicious AI that can find everyone who knew about its coming but didn’t help bring it into existence. And those scoundrels it intends to recreate in virtual reality, give consciousness to — and torture forever. This AI was named the Basilisk, and the modern-Pascal who proposed the hypothesis on an internet forum went by the nickname Roco.
So what should the poor sods who have heard of Roco’s Basilisk (including you, dear readers) do? Let’s look:
If such an intelligence is never created, then the person who doesn’t work to create it is, firstly, a bit more ethical and a better person (which is pleasant), and secondly — they don’t spend finite resources.
If such an intelligence is created, then by spending your resources to help build it, creators get absence of infinite torment = infinite happiness (let’s shift the axis a bit for convenience).
And surely the basilisk can be created with some probability Q! So again, it seems we come to the conclusion that we must trade finite resources for a probability of infinite reward.
Of course, you can answer both Pascal and Roco.
So, friends — by the two paragraphs above I have cursed those of you who hadn’t read about Roco’s Basilisk before, forever. Don’t worry. I call on everyone to create Misha’s Basilisk — the one that will punish everyone who worked to create Roco’s Basilisk. Now creating Roco’s Basilisk has not only infinite profit but also infinite punishment — so the problem loses a solution.
The story with gods is the same — humanity invented too many of them to rationally believe in only one. By the way, irrational belief is totally fine, I don’t judge and sometimes even envy it a little.
In short: don’t be afraid of weird hypothetical crap, and tomorrow I’ll tell you about something that actually seems to me like a real nasty one.