16 KiB
[D]Rationalist Response To Living In My Verse
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Author: u/None *
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URL:
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Score: 13
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Created: 2015-07-10T08:51:26
Post:
[deleted]
Comments:
u/EliezerYudkowsky [+10] Godric Gryffindor (9 hours later)
The source of magic is dumber than I am? I bet I can work with this. Step one is to gather all the data I can on different bargains and their outcomes.
u/JackStargazer [+4] Primordial Apologist (16 hours later)
Dumber, yes, but omniscient and with a Death Note level sympathetic range kill spell.
The real question is where self preservation falls in its list of priorities. If it wants to directly oppose 'person who has a decent chance of destroying me or changing my utility function', it could do so years in advance or just prevent their birth.
An omniscient idiot is still very dangerous. If this is actual omniscience, I'm not sure exactly what level of 'subhuman' OP is talking about, as it would be able to deterministically predict all of the future and optimize for the negative outcomes desired in it's utility function perfectly.
The Source is basically the Cthaeh.
With a Death Note.
u/MugaSofer [+2] (a day later)
I think it's merely panopticon-level omniscence. It sees all, but doesn't necessarily understand.
u/Nepene [+6] (4 hours later)
Based off that, magic is actively malevolent and not a net good to society. Eternal torture is the result of death.
So, we need some form of immortality, we need some form of way of competing with the AI, and we need some way of suppressing other mages.
Seek to subvert scientists into our scheme with social prowess and whatever rituals we can do to get them on our side. Increase the presence of cameras and recorders in society, but make no special effort to detect mages. This should passively weaken other mages.
Do radical, inhuman experiments to create some sort of scientific immortality that isn't dependent on magic.
Convert the vast majority of humans into something inhuman that the AI doesn't care about. Leave a small population of humans for it to influence.
Victory.
u/Murska1FIN [+4] (an hour later)
Begin work on figuring out how to hack the omniscient subhuman intelligence so as to be able to resurrect everyone without murdering people.
u/None [+4] (6 hours later)
Joke answer: Find masochists and offer them an eternity of bearable pain.
u/Gurkenglas [+3] (8 hours later)
What constitutes an attempt to make magic common knowledge? Could you distribute to the internet an encrypted encyclopedia of "secret information" whose existence is common knowledge, which can be decrypted given a password that you can spread to a subset of all people?
What about if it's a simple password, or the kind that can be brute-forced, or the kind that future mathematical advances may be able to work around, or the answer to a public riddle?
(A fun example kind of password would be "magic", since only people who are aware of magic would ever try that, heh.)
This all could be tested by having someone other than me try to do it. Who needs rituals to kill people as a means to an end? (Although I hope that having someone try to do it does not constitute an attempt... one could just post to the internet this exact comment; someone will try it, and this may be less likely to be seen as an attempt if properly worded.)
u/Jiro_T [+3] (13 hours later)
Attempts to make magic common knowledge are met with immediate death from the source of magic; this is particularly dangerous in the information age, where putting magical information on the internet can invoke this effect.
What happens once someone puts a lot of information on the Internet, they die, but now everyone on the Internet has access to knowledge about magic?
Most of the fancier effects require murder - distinct from euthanasia or accidental killing or legal execution, too.
Can you prevent the people in your country from performing magic by declaring what would otherwise be murder to be a legal execution? And on the other hand, if someone believes that they are performing murder, but it's actually euthanasia or legal execution, will the magic work?
What happens if you try doing magic with a legal execution and the execution is declared illegal by the courts five years later? Does the magic retroactively come into effect?
u/Sithoid [+2] (21 hours later)
I think this requires a very precise definition of "legal". My first hypothesis would be that the old "royalty is sacred" belief should be taken literally: the Source flags a certain person ("king") as a bearer of the property "makes decisions Legal". Alternatively, it can work with an object ("Royal Seal"). I can't instantly think of any experiments though: we'd need to issue an execution that would be technically legal, but avoid involving the "king" or the "seal", which might be tricky.
u/Jiro_T [+3] (23 hours later)
Some people believe that abortion is murder. Furthermore, a lot of people believe abortion is murder but don't alieve it. Furthermore, abortion is something that is done without the king or a seal. This makes abortion a useful test case on exactly what counts as murder, whether actual illegality is required, or whether it works based on belief that something is murder, and depending on the answer, it can be a cheap safe source of magic.
Of course, it's also possible that abortion actually is murder in a strong sense in this world, since it has immortal souls.
And there's a fine line between accidental killing and murder. If you kill someone driving and have an extremely high blood alcohol content, that's murder. But your chance to cause an accident gradually goes down as your blood alcohol level goes down; any cutoff point for the difference between accident and murder is going to be arbitrary.
I suspect the intended interpretation is "it counts as murder if the Source thinks it's the type of act which corrupts people", in which case you can only munchkin it if the Source thinks something corrupts people and it really doesn't, which depends on exactly how good at ethics the Source is. What if the Source thinks that deaths in sweatshops are callous forms of capitalist indifference to life, so the Source counts them as murder, and someone else thinks those deaths are acceptable because they voluntarily took the sweatshop job and much of life involves tradeoffs that increase the chance of death? If the second person is actually right, you can get magic by milking the Source's poor ethical thinking. Perhaps the source just uses the ethics of an average person and considers murder anything this person would consider murder; the average person isn't too good at thinking about ethics and would never even think of the sweatshop argument (regardless of whether it's correct).
Also, for "it counts as murder if the Source thinks it corrupts people", the Source can anticipate that people will use "does this result in magic" as a guide to morality and will grant or deny magic for a few random acts just to mess people up. Perhaps abortion isn't murder, but the Source makes it produce magic anyway because the Source anticipates that doing so will result in outlawing abortions. Perhaps the Source decides not to make killing of "inferior races" produce magic so as to encourage Nazis to think they are doing good things. (Of course, this also allows you tio gain magic from ethical acts if you are able to outthink the Source enough to figure this out.)
u/MugaSofer [+1] (a day later)
I got the impression that it's based on some unclear "code of ethics", not legality. So killing someone you think the world is better off without might count as "execution", killing some random innocent counts as "murder", killing someone you're actually helping by killing them counts as "euthanasia" etc.
No word on how much this is based on belief vs. reality, though.
u/nevinera [+4] (4 hours later)
Immediately perform the resurrection ritual dozens of times, carefully 'screwing up' each time, producing dozens of existential threats - this almost guarantees the destruction of humanity. Given the inevitable torturous afterlife of nearly every human to be born, stopping any more from being born is the priority.
Murdering everyone into items to reduce their infinite pain's degree is a secondary concern - start that campaign after ensuring the end of humanity.
Note: this response assumes perfect knowledge and belief - a real rational response would almost certainly be to disbelieve some aspect of the system that makes less sense (like the 'afterlife of pain' part), and begin attempting to disprove it.
u/Gurkenglas [+3] (8 hours later)
Hey, none of this rules out a positive singularity. An FAI could simply produce and sacrifice babies to bring everyone back.
u/nevinera [+1] (10 hours later)
Babies which would then undergo everlasting torment?
There are positive outcomes that remain, depending on the definitions being used. It's possible that uploading doesn't qualify as dying, or that the definition of 'civilization' allows permanent nomadism to satisfy the entities utility function. Are we willing to allow a few billion extra perma-tortured entities to exist to test those ideas?
u/philip1201 [+2] (a day later)
Babies genetically modified such that they consider eternal torment pleasurable?
u/nevinera [+1] (2 days later)
I'm not sure genetics affect the sensations of your immortal soul, but I rather doubt it. And it certainly isn't amenable to experimentation :-)
u/MugaSofer [+2] (a day later)
Ooh, I really, really like this system.
... do you have to randomly do unethical things and look for random magic effects to find new rituals experimentally?
... and screwing up the most difficult step turns the resurrected person into a unique, malevolent monster, which is likely to be an existential threat.
How ... does anyone know this? How often have existential threats shown up?
u/MrCogmor [+2] (a day later)
Presumably the rituals come from somewhere and there is some kind of methodology to it. Possibly there is a really simple ritual which is used to learn about other rituals and the information comes from there.
u/FuguofAnotherWorld [+2] Roll the Dice on Fate (a day later)
Step 1: Identify what the Source considers to be immoral enough to grant power. What are the limits, where are the lines.
Step 2: Identify whether such limits are regional or universal. If a thing is illegal in one country and not another, does that have an effect? It can be worked with either way.
Step 3: Identify a thing that the Source considers immoral that I/humanity does not.
Step 4: Dependent on step 2, either go to a country where that thing is legal and abuse the crap out of it, or go to a country where a thing that you think is perfectly fine is illegal and abuse it that way.
Step 5: Power overwhelming.
In short a good way to keep systems like this secure is to make them actively antagonistic to clever people who try to exploit loopholes. A judge with the power to laugh at your attempt and throw you back sans an arm is an effective deterrent to people trying to be clever.
u/KZLightning [+1] (a day later)
Such a judge would require at least human-level intelligence. Otherwise, you could successfully trick said judge repeatedly. But since the OP says that the AI is "of subhuman intelligence", there is every reason to believe that you can trick that judge.
There are some people who do an act intending to exploit a loophole. There are other people who do that very same act without intending to exploit anything. It takes intelligence to distinguish these two. After all, there is a continuum between these two states so it is not clear cut to easy to distinguish.
The ultimate goal should be modifying the utility function of the AI. Ultimately though, that requires greater knowledge and greater scientific ability (or perhaps magical ability).
u/MugaSofer [+1] (a day later)
Attempts to make magic common knowledge are met with immediate death from the source of magic
... before they can be completed, presumably, or the internet would be full of details on magic by now. Which makes it explicit that the Source of Magic can read my mind. Concerning, if it's smart enough to just kill me for daring to try and oppose it.
The source of magic is an omniscient (not quite omnipotent) but subhuman intelligence whose utility function is "undermine human civilization by enacting Faustian deals". The vast majority of those Faustian deals take the form of standardized rituals.
But not all of them, then? Can I propose new rituals to the Source of Magic?
An afterlife exists and all minds go there on death. Unfortunately, a vast majority of its inhabitants are in eternal unbearable pain
But no all of them are? Is there a spell that exempts me, personally, from Hell? Because psychopaths are gonna be all over that.
Also, I'm inclined to argue that level of pain makes them no longer meaningfully the same person, and possibly not even human. Depends on whether you can take them out of hell and recover anything, I guess...
There's a ritual for resurrecting people (and erasing all effects of the afterlife)
Ah. That ... that alone seems to suggest a Good Ending, since we can acquire mindstate copies of everyone at the moment of their death. My first thought is to copy people in some other, possibly nonmagical way, and then murder some of the copies to bring other people back ... but the Source of Magic may not count that, and if it does then that's kind of a bad sign. Still, the fact that it's possible in principle is all that matters.
One of the most common rituals involves murdering someone and binding their mind to an object to grant that object power.
Are they then immune to the resurrection ritual?
The object may be used to communicate with the mind, to apply physical force, and to teleport to other places the object has been, all without using any additional magic past what was used to create it. The object may not be destroyed, but may be sent away to an empty void.
"Teleport to places the object has been", eh? Can only the object teleport, or only the user? Is it under the control of the bound spirit, or what? What happens if I teleport a bullet into your heart?
u/philip1201 [+1] (a day later)
The source of magic is an omniscient (not quite omnipotent) but subhuman intelligence whose utility function is "undermine human civilization by enacting Faustian deals".
Since the SoM is quite capable of killing people without Faustian deals, and there is a distinct risk that civilisation may flourish despite its efforts, it must prefer Faustian behaviour to actually succeeding to screw over humanity. Find a way to trade Faustianism against actual awfulness.
An afterlife exists and all minds go there on death. Unfortunately, a vast majority of its inhabitants are in eternal unbearable pain, making them psychologically unrecognizable after an instant. This is known, but not widely known, among magic users, because it's useful in magical theory but not in practice.
How is this known?
Attempts to make magic common knowledge are met with immediate death from the source of magic; this is particularly dangerous in the information age, where putting magical information on the internet can invoke this effect. There's nothing wrong with letting an individual or group know magic exists,
What about sharing a packet of information which you don't even know contains information about magic? If someone uploads scans from a rot13 diary containing magical information to reddit and they don't know the rot13 encryption, do they still die?