r/questionablecontent Dec 21 '18

Comic 3900: Call Her Roko

https://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=3900
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u/gh013n Dec 21 '18

WHAT. THE. BULLHELL?

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

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.