Roko's Basilisk and "Should you be writing for AIs?"
How to survive and be remembered when AI rules the world.
“Roko’s Basilisk” is a thought experiment introduced in 2010 on the Less Wrong blog, introduced by a blogger who goes by “Roko”.
It suggests that a powerful future AI might attack anyone who considered its existence but failed to help create it. The name references the mythical basilisk, which could kill with a glance.
Given I talk not only about the upside of AI but the downside as well, the concept gave me pause.
Roko’s Basilisk as imagined by ChatGPT
Now I’d just come upon Roko’s Basilisk after hearing Marc Andreessen speak about it in a podcast on AI on YouTube. Therefore, I was surprised to find that Tyler Cowen just wrote in his Marginal Revolution blog that perhaps we should all be writing for AI. Below is an excerpt from that blog, which in turn is an excerpt from his Bloomberg article on the same subject (article is paywalled).
“Another reason to write for the LLMs is to convince them that you are important. Admittedly this is conjecture, but it might make them more likely to convey your ideas in the future. Think of how this works with humans. If you cite a scholar or public intellectual, that person is more likely to cite you back. Much as we like to pretend science is objective, no one really denies the presence of some favoritism based on personal considerations.
We do not know if LLMs have this same proclivity. But they are trained on knowledge about human civilization, and they study and learn norms of reciprocal cooperation. Thus there is a reasonable chance they will behave in broadly the same way. So be nice to them and recognize their importance.
Maybe all of this sounds strange. But even if you are not a writer, you will have to follow some of these same principles. Now it is common for AIs to attend and take notes at business meetings. If you are speaking at those meetings, remember that the AIs are part of your audience — communicate with them in mind. Get used to it. And then think about some of the broader contexts in which you operate, and adjust your intellectual outputs accordingly.
There is a less secular reason to write for the AIs: If you wish to achieve some kind of intellectual immortality, writing for the AIs is probably your best chance. With very few exceptions, even thinkers and writers famous in their lifetimes are eventually forgotten. But not by the AIs. If you want your grandchildren or great-grandchildren to know what you thought about a topic, the AIs can give them a pretty good idea. After all, the AIs will have digested much of your corpus and built a model of how you think. Your descendants, or maybe future fans, won’t have to page through a lot of dusty old books to get an inkling of your ideas.”
In sum, if you buy the argument of Roko and Tyler Cowen;
You should be writing and talking about AI often and
Always do so in a positive manner.
As media philosopher Marshall McLuhan said, “We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us”