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Comment by sumeno | Hacker News Reader

There's a group of people who have reinvented religion because they're afraid of an AI torturing them for eternity if they don't work on AI hard enough. It's very silly but there are many people who actually believe this is a risk: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roko's_basilisk

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I was referring to people I personally know.

The existence of crazy/anxious people in the world is well established, and not in dispute.

I really don't think that very many people are concerned about AI because of Roko's Basilisk; that's more of a meme.

The AI alignment folks seem much more anxious about an AI version of Pascal's Wager they cooked up.

Sure some of them maybe, but given that many concerned people think the chance of extinction is 10% or higher, it's not really low probability enough to be considered a Pascal's Wager.

I didn't know that 10% was a common threshold. Thank you for the insight.

You are cherry picking the single most absurd event in a history of over 20 years of public discussion of AI catastrophic risk.

Only about .0003 of all public discussion of AI catastrophic risk over those 20 years has invoked or referred to Roko's basilisk in any way.

I don't know of anyone worried about AI who is worried mainly because of the basilisk.

Next you'll mention Pascal's Mugging, which likewise is the main worry of exactly zero of the sane people worried about AI -- and (despite the representations of at least one past comment on this site) was never even a component of any argument for the dangerousness of continued "progress" in AI.

So you agree that there is more than "a single person worr[ied] about AIs taking over humanity."

I was specifically pointing out how absurd the most ridiculous people in that category are

Not even them, simulations of them. They're not even real! Why the hell should I care if some far-future AI tortures simulations of me? Go ahead, spin up a hundred, hell spin up a trillion!

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