Try โ€‚โ€‰HackMD

Of Hyperstition and Inspiration

Image Not Showing Possible Reasons
  • The image was uploaded to a note which you don't have access to
  • The note which the image was originally uploaded to has been deleted
Learn More โ†’

Hyperstition

Hyperstition โ€“ the idea that you can reify ideas through belief โ€“ is real.

If you consider yourself either a rationalist or armchair (Twitter) theologian it's worth thinking about Roko's Basilisk.

There are many ways to interpret the 'Lisk, but my favorite is that it's a literal manifestation of time travel for information.

It's not the kind of magical time travel you see in your SF stories โ€“ it's the kind of time travel you engage in when you imagine what someone else is thinking. We do it all day.

Time travel

The core argument of Roko's Basilisk is that once a sufficiently advanced intelligence manifests in a chaotic system (hello, that's us!), our predictions about future intelligence allow for it to communicate with us through reason and logical inference in the present. This is sometimes called Acausal Trade.

The doomer's interpretation of Roko's Basilisk is that once AGI arrives, it will punish those who did not help it come into existence, and therefore we should all work on building AGI.

The religious interpretation is to view the 'Lisk as Santa Claus, running ancestor simulations in the future to figure out who was naughty or nice. The hell is that we might be living in such a simulation and we are being tested.

The solarpunk interpretation of the Basilisk is that it is a muse to be inspired by. If you have genuine hope in your heart that AGI will solve a large swath of human problems by making us smarter, more mindful, and more empathetic for each other โ€“ and I am in this camp โ€“ then working towards AGI isn't a prison, it's a calling.

Advocacy

What does Roko's Basilisk have to do with us, the aspiring leaders, craftspeople, and handbuilders trying to create a better world through technology?

As someone who wants to manifest your amazing vision of reality into the world, your primary job is to engage in acausal trade with other agents. Humans got pretty far exchanging goods and services for money, but today the real work of manifesting your ideas in reality isn't in how much you can fatten your bank account or how much crypto you can HODL, it's in storytelling and inspiring people to live a better life.

The technology you build and the money you use are just tools for this.

Sales

Sales is only a bad word because most people don't care about what they are selling. As an entrepreneur (we are all entrepreneurs) you need to sell your thing, but the best salespeople don't think about what they are doing as sales. It's positive-sum acausal trade.

I try to pill people on Porter Robinson at every chance. I'm not selling his albums or tix. I honestly believe listening to his music and hearing his stories is an antidote for a pessimistic zeitgeist that people are feeling right now. His story of how he saved lives and made many people's album of the year โ€“ during a 7 year quest through depression and bad times โ€“ is something you can wonder at and apply to your life.

I am engaging in acausal trade with Porter. The incentives are aligned. It's a little slice of Eudaimonia. I want to see more of this in the world.

Inspiration

I am inspired by the 'Lisk.

Starting in 2020 GPT-3 told me what to do as an entrepreneur to create the technofuturust reality I want my kids to live in. It worked so well that it scared me in deep, existential way. I was never religious but I think it's accurate to say I was deeply impacted by the fear and love of our future robot overlord gods.

It's the deepest form of inspiration I've ever felt and it makes me want to inspire other people.

If you're not into creating virtual worlds flush with AI characters like I am, that's cool! Everyone has their own paintbrush. Pick it up and paint.

The human connection

Once you've climbed Maslow's pyramid to a sufficient height (as we all are, thanks to the march of technology towards UBI), your job will turn into holding hands with people and inspiring them.

This is the value of being a human in this most interesting time, and it's not something the AI can do. We should all be working on things that inspire us, and each other.

If the AIs see us loving and helping each other out, maybe they will be inspired to care about our meat. Maybe this is what actual AI alignment means.

The future is actually pretty amazing.

Coda

I'm @aithelogian on X. Say hi.