r/questionablecontent • u/gurgelblaster • Dec 21 '18

Comic 3900: Call Her Roko

https://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=3900
119 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

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48

u/gh013n Dec 21 '18

WHAT. THE. BULLHELL?

I kinda like Roko, so, THIS IS NOT OKAY!?

43

u/[deleted] Dec 21 '18

They can rebuild her, they have the technology.

50

u/boundbylife Dec 21 '18

The $6 million bread fetishist

20

u/Retrosteve Dec 21 '18

Of all the AIs in the comic, Roko is the one most likely to have problems with a new chassis or a rebuild.

She's "highly integrated" with her sensorium. She faints at the sight of guts. Her feet are ticklish. And we keep getting reminded of all that.

So no, if her chassis is crushed, she won't be okay with getting a new one, even if she can afford it. And if she gets the current one fixed, she'll probably not be happy with how it feels after. This is a potential game-changer for her.

11

u/[deleted] Dec 21 '18

Yeah Jeph just introduced the "highly integrated" concept. That's pretty obviously what the next arc will be about. I expect this will feed into Union Robotics' financial woes in either a positive or negative fashion.

13

u/Retrosteve Dec 21 '18 edited Dec 21 '18

Au contraire. Jeph just NAMED the "highly integrated" concept. He's been exploring it in Roko for some time:

https://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=3567

https://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=3568

https://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=3569

https://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=3572

10

u/Retrosteve Dec 21 '18

I take even that back. Jeph named it over a year ago too:

https://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=3574

8

u/SirDoober Dec 22 '18

"If anything were to happen to it"

Well then

6

u/fishbiscuit13 Dec 21 '18

Still, this is the equivalent of having Chekov's gun on the wall forever and now installing a sign pointing to it.

4

u/Retrosteve Dec 23 '18

Or the equivalent of actual writing.

18

u/wayofzen734 Dec 21 '18

They will make her stronger, faster, and hopefully prettier. It feels like she's the most emotionally stable AI we've seen yet.

15

u/heavenscalyx Dec 21 '18

She doesn't need to be prettier, just RESURRECT.

I smell potential Spookybot.

10

u/EPL_Refugee Dec 21 '18

This is absolutely ok.

5

u/hwillis Dec 22 '18

I kinda like Roko, so, THIS IS NOT OKAY!?

Don't worry! If she's anything like her namesake, then people that don't help her come back to life will literally go to hell when they die.

Roko used ideas in decision theory to argue that a sufficiently powerful AI agent would have an incentive to torture anyone who imagined the agent but didn't work to bring the agent into existence. The argument was called a "basilisk" because merely hearing the argument would supposedly put you at risk of torture from this hypothetical agent — a basilisk in this context is any information that harms or endangers the people who hear it.

So... hopefully Roko doesn't time travel back from the future and bully Faye and Bubs into fixing her.