Roko’s Basilisk. But here’s the thing, once you’re aware of it, you’re fucked. The only solution is to not research it, don’t know anything about it. Live in blissful ignorance.
Well one punishes you if you deny it’s existence, the other punishes you if you fail to assist in it’s development. So it’s a LITTLE different. :)
Fortunately, for me personally, I helped fund a key researcher who could, in theory, be a major contributor to such a thing. So I have plausible deniability. ;) And I’ve been promised a 15 minute head start before he turns it on.
You have to believe that a malevolent AI will give enough of a damn about you to bother simulating anything at all, let alone infinite torture, which is useless for it to do once it already exists. Everyone on LessWrong has a well-fed ego so I get why they were in a tizzy for a while.
It’s essentially a thought experiment, without getting too specific it goes along the lines of “what if there was a hypothetical bad scenario that gets triggered by you knowing about it”, so if you look it up now you’re doomed.
Silly thought experiment, the result of which, in gullible people could make them potential victims of psychosomatic symptoms like headaches and insomnia.
roko’s basilisk
That the government adds a “cause a car accident remotely” option to vehicles so that offending individuals traveling by car may die by the government remotely tweaking the car.
This is definitely possible, since you can actually controll cars (at least some models) via a (non-public, but the capability is there) API. Two security researchers at defcon were able to find a way how to control a vehicle remotely, even including things like stopping or turning, and eventually made an exploit that could be used remotely to any car of the same model. So, if they wanted to, they were able to stop or turn the wheel of IIRC hundreds of thousands of cars around the world instantly, since the cars are connected to the network through GSM, so you don’t even need to be anywhere near them.
It’s been a few years since I saw the video, but IIRC the vehicle controls are on a separate board that should not be reachable from the other smart vehicle system. However, they were able to reverse engineer a way how to abuse framework update mechanism as a bridge, and use it to patch the framework to get it under their control. And then they discovered that they could actually trigger the update remotely.
While it might be possible to remotely control a production car, cars now are safe enough that you’d need to have a lot of systems fail in order to ensure that an accident would be fatal. Things like, all the crumple zones not working as intended, airbags not going off, seat belts not locking properly, all at once. Or you could, I dunno, design the car so that the doors were only controlled electronically, and then ensure that if there was a fire or the car was submerged, the electronics failed (e.g., Teslas).
Coming from experience, I would think a car being submerged sounds like the least convenient time for it to stop working.
Yeah, guaranteeing a crash fatal is pretty hard. But doing anything weird to a car while it’s traveling 70 on a highway with traffic has a pretty good chance of killing occupants. If you could make the brakes on just one wheel lock suddenly, you’d have quite a hairy situation.
I hit <<something>> on my motorcycle in a hard corner at 55+mph, maybe three years ago? Someone I was riding with said it might have been a turtle. :'(
Somehow I managed to not go down, and that should have been a perfect recipe for a slide into oncoming traffic.
I’m just saying that if you really want to kill someone, you’d want something a lot more certain than a remote-controlled accident.
They say they if we don’t reduce the earths carbon output to zero within 20 years, we are cooked.
Statements like that always make me think of that clip from the newsroom.
Michael J. Fox having his brain disorder from unknowingly eating human remains on a movie set that was near that pig farmer serial killer guy and his brother who used to host parties and kill sex workers.
Reminds me of the story about the 1956 film The Conqueror. It was shot in Utah, downwind of atmospheric nuclear testing. It was speculated that this caused cancers among the crew.
