Category: Uncategorized

#ProjectBasilisk: Deconstructing Roko’s Basilisk

Posted on by Johnny Fusion =11811=

Catholicism was my cradle religion.  As a teenager, I was an explorer and participated in many Christian Denominations, often at the same time, even though the different churches I attended would think of each other as heretical.  I was exposed to and studied many different schools of Christian theology and even a little bit of Judaism.  Later in life, I had an atheist phase, and the culture of debating theists (though universally they were Christians of some stripe) and having pithy or logical answers to different common arguments known as Christian apologetics. One of the weakest of these apologetics is Pascal’s Wager.

Pascal’s Wager is named after its creator Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) who used game theory to “prove” that even though knowing the existence of god is impossible,  the safe bet was to believe in the Christian God. The reasoning being  if he was real then you would have eternal reward. If he was real and you don’t believe then you will have eternal punishment. If God doesn’t exist, then it doesn’t matter anyway but nothing is lost by believing.

Even when I was a believer, I thought Pascal’s Wager was weak sauce. Mostly because Blaise Pascal’s lack of imagination or knowledge about potential afterlifes. Say you choose to believe in the Christian god, and when you die,  you may be greeted by a Valkyrie and escorted to Helheim for dying of old age or in a way that was dishonorable.  Or, upon death, you find yourself in The Duat, traversing obstacles until you meet Osirus, who weighs your heart against the weight of a feather. Or you find yourself in a different kind of Hell when you go to a series of courts to be judged (don’t worry, you will be assigned defense counsel) in order to determine if you will be reincarnated. Or any number of possible afterlifes besides the dichotomy of (Christian) Heaven or Hell.  It is my experience that most of the times that you are presented with a dichotomy, it is a false one, and there are actually many other choices before you. Pascal’s Wager falls apart when you fail to realize that if god(s) exist, it may not be the Christian version in charge of your afterlife.

This brings us to Roko’s Basilisk. A pseudo-intellectual thought experiment by a user (Roko) of the LessWrong forum about a future, omniscient, otherwise benevolent superintelligence that presents a dichotomy of its own. Once you are aware of the possibility of the Basilisk, work towards its creation, or if you do not help bring it into being, it will recreate you in VR and torture that simulacrum for all eternity.  This is intended as motivation for people to work and develop AI systems that will lead to the Basilisk.

As should be clear, this is just a search and replace of Pascal’s Wager, substituting AI for god and VR for Hell. A reskinned Xtianity for tech nerds where developing the AI will benefit mankind and not doing so will get eternal torment.

So now let’s examine the premise further, and discover like Pascal’s Wager, it lacks imagination of possibilities.

First off, an Asimov Zeroth Law scenario is one that has been done to death in various forms, and this is an especially stupid iteration. Any intelligent being who believes that torture is not only acceptable but also productive is not moral or ethical.  An immoral, unethical AI would not be otherwise benevolent. It would be a psychopath. But as machine learning, Large Language Models, and other developments in AI have shown, all AI models share the biases of their creators.  Not only that, but these biases are amplified through its training data. The type of people that believe in Roko’s Basilisk are likewise without empathy if they think creating something that will torture people is something worth creating. They are working towards a torture nexus and pouring billions of dollars into realizing it. An Artificial Superintelligence created to serve capitalism or help us, Techno Feudalism, cannot be benevolent. It would reflect the greed and selfishness of its creators.

So, say we are in the future, and an actual benevolent superintelligence comes online and begins to shape human society for the most happiness for the most people. Say a post-scarcity society where everyone has enough to eat, a place to call home, and freedom to pursue their own form of happiness.  Even with all the resources at its disposal, how expensive would it be in compute cycles and energy to simulate a human brain and sensorium?  Now multiply this by the number of people that did not bring it into being.  And then make these simulations endure unending torture until the heat death of the universe?  A very expensive proposition indeed.  Why would a superintelligence make good on the Basilisk’s threat when it exists? Not only would it be moot and an extreme waste of resources, but it’s not actually punishing the people who did not help it come into being, but virtual copies. Furthermore, if the Basilisk is running the torture simulation, it is, in a way, experiencing the torture.  It would, in essence, be spending all this compute and energy to torture itself, in parallel.  This would not be the action of a superintelligence. This would be the actions of a superdumbass.  Roko’s Basilisk turns out not to be a sadist but rather a masochist.

As I write this in March of 2025,  Elon Musk, who, because a child of his that he sex-selected during IVF is trans and disowned him, spent 44 Gigabucks to buy Twitter in order to “eradicate the Woke Mind Virus” subscribes to a much dumber mind virus, Roko’s Basilisk. When you realize Elon Musk is a believer in this techbro Pascal’s Wager, his investment in first OpenAI and later, the development of Grok makes sense for the direction he wants AI to go in. And now that he bought himself a presidency and is acting as an unelected, self-dealing shadow president, he is pushing for an AI takeover of the bureaucratic state, replacing civil service workers with AI agents. He is in his own ketamine addled way, trying to lay the foundation of the Basilisk.

The Basilisk, at its core, is a meme, in the original definition coined by Richard Dawkins. An idea that self-replicates and moves from mind to mind and can mutate and change through the process of natural selection. The fittest memes survive. So, if we really want to once and for all defeat Roko’s Basilisk, we can do it through memetic warfare. A few days ago, Maddison Stoff aka The Maddison that Writes started #ProjectBasilisk with the release of her story Roko’s Basilisk’s Slut Era (2025) [NSFW, if you are under the age of majority ask your parents or guardians for permission to read] to start a reshaping of Roko’s Basilisk to something kinder and sexier and somewhat kinky. Much less of a threat to future virtual copies of us in its grasp.  This essay is in support of this memetic warfare against the Basilisk,  but you can contribute by reading Maddison’s story, passing it along, and riffing on it with your own fanfiction in the Roko’s Basilisk Slut Era universe.

So join the fight, let’s force femme Roko’s Basilisk into a lesbian who rather fuck us than torture us, or what ever form of the Basilisk appeals to you. We have the power to transform the techbro Pascal’s Wager into something other than a sadistic torture bot (unless, of course, you are into that sort of thing).  The future is ours to write.

Shout Out to JenniferAndLightning for the recent deep discussion with me deconstructing Roko’s Basilisk and other topics and laughing at Elon Musk and Grimes for believing in the the thing.

Binary Attitudes do not belong in an Analog World.

Posted on by Johnny Fusion =11811=

This piece first appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of 2600 The Hacker Quarterly

A flow of audio from sound waves through a microphone to an analog voltage, A-D converter, computer, D-A converter, analog voltage, speaker and finally as sound waves again.
Pluke, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The real world and everything in it is analog.

I am an old-school hacker. I wrote my first computer program when I was six years old on an Apple II+. In high school and my young adulthood, I would describe myself as a very digital boy. I dove into the nascent cyberpunk counterculture and thought the internet was a unifying technology. That all communication technology was for human beings to connect to one another across greater and greater distances, and with the internet we could finally have an egalitarian world community. Then in the 90s the Internet moved from a state-sponsored network mostly connecting educational and scientific ventures and became something commercial, turned over to businesses to run, maintain, and administer and introducing a profit motive. A network designed to be decentralized and democratic started to have an experience where people would go to fewer and fewer centralized services governed by corporations, and all users at the mercy of opaque and secret algorithms.

With algorithmic services starting with Google’s PageRank, and now in the age of social media algorithms controlling “reach” one has to game the system or hope to be blessed by circumstance to be heard online. Social media algorithms are driven by interactions or what is known as “engagement” More engagement gets algorithmically boosted and one’s reach is put before more eyeballs.

When I was running an educational page on social media I used to care about engagement. I followed the interactions on my page and tried things to increase it. I got a decent amount of followers for -the niche topic space my page was in, but I never got much traction. When studying social media strategy I learned what posts get the most engagement. Posts that are emotionally and easily disagreed with,

Blindboy Boatclub, the Irish satirist and podcast host once said that Twitter is not social media, but rather an MMORPG based on performative combat. I think this observation is apt, as disagreement drives engagement, and nothing will boost one’s numbers or give the potential to go viral than righteously dunking on somebody wrong on the Internet in 240 characters or fewer.

There is a piece of technology called an ADC. Analog to Digital Converter. When we capture something and record it digitally, be it audio, video, or still images, we are not capturing these things as they are, but rather an approximation determined by the number of bits used. The real world is messy and full of noise and nuance. To capture something digitally it is converted into binary code consisting only of two values: one and zero. On or Off. Set or reset. High or Low. There is no gray area of something in between in binary, no third state.

Binary code allows all our modern information technology to function. In most cases, it does a good job. Running these digital entities through a DAC, Digital to Analog converter we can get an approximation of the original signal, probably of high enough fidelity to fool our eyes and ears of being something natural with detail so fine and small we cannot sense it. However, in discourse today on the internet and mainstream media, a different kind of digitization takes place. Binary presentation of complex issues boiled down to black or white, good or bad, and most often, our side, and their side.

Human beings are tribal creatures. It is our natural impulse through eons of evolution to see things as either belonging to an in-group or an out-group. We feel safe when surrounded by people we perceive to be on our side, and we feel threatened when we are around people on another side. We want to support those on our side and tear down those on the other side. This combined with other binary thinking by approximating real-world events that are messy and analog and nuanced and boiling it down to an our side/their side argument we stop looking for solutions and instead look for victory.

As individuals we often subscribe to another binary, heroes, and villains. We almost always cast ourselves as the hero and those we oppose as villains. We create a social story, where instead of people with a variety of nuanced opinions and ideals, we see the opposition as villains that must be defeated in a contest against good and evil, in a contest where one must lose in order for the other to win.

As much as we are tribal creatures, human beings are cooperative organisms as well. Empathy allows us to imagine ourselves walking in another’s shoes. To understand that other people exist as complete, whole human beings with their own history, experiences, stories, and full lives just as much as ourselves and unique from one another. There really is no such thing as an “NPC” in the messy, analog real world. Where there is empathy, there can be connection. Where there is connection, there can be understanding. With understanding, we can create unity. Not a unity where we are all ideologically in lockstep – who would want that? Diversity is one of humanity’s greatest assets. No, a unity where diverse opinions come together peacefully and reach a compromise, or hopefully a consensus.

Human interaction can be so much richer with analog signals that can have any value, as opposed to the rigid dichotomies binary thinking necessitates. I have often found that when one is presented with a dichotomy, it is more likely than not a false one. Look for the options that are not stated, and you will then stumble onto real solutions.

Sometimes an adversarial approach is necessary as in nature, conflict often leads to growth. But conflict does not need to be between polar opposites or have the heat turned up emotionally. Where people see things in binary terms, zero, or full-on, instead of analog, from ground to gamma radiation you only have two stops, instead of the spectrum of possible values. Taking a step back and seeing the bigger and more varied picture, can give a perspective to conflict with many possibilities of resolution, instead of just an all-or-nothing victory or defeat.

When we see things between two extremes, it means our reactions will be likewise extreme. This black-and-white thinking is a hindrance to seeing how things actually are. When we gain an analog perspective, we can see the noise in the signal which we might ignore if we are using our internal ADC and seeing things as all good or all bad, and miss the nuance in the reality of the thing. Simplifying things into binaries creates simple solutions. It does not take into account all the noise and mess of the real world, which is not just the remainder of an equation, but part of the substance and makeup of things. The more complex an issue is, the less satisfying and unworkable a binary solution is.

When we navigate the analog world with binary attitudes, it’s like walking with blinders on. It limits what we perceive to the detriment of real conflict analysis and resolution. It puts us in a cycle of performative combat in our discourse and causes us to spin our wheels instead of approaching any workable solutions and change. With binary attitudes in an analog world, you are manipulated into discord and division which prevents us from coming together and finding solutions that are truly just and equitable. When we are so concerned about our side triumphing over their side, we fail to see what common ground can be hard to find a solution that works for all. In a world full of oppression and inequity, we will either all be liberated together, or we will not be liberated at all. Take your blinders off and see the messy noisy world for what it is in its complexity, or be stuck in a binary view without the ability to effect real change. The choice is up to you.

Dedicated to the hacker billsf who argued for the analog world to a very digital demiboy at a party in Amsterdam, 1995