But how can an individual do an Elon Musk job on existential risk? Not everyone is a good enough entrepreneur to drop out of grad school and come out with a $300 million startup before their classmates even have PhDs. Well, there is another way to make $300,000,000. Start with $30,000, and using a quantum random number generator, gamble it on the forex markets at a 10,000:1 ratio. Then in the branches where your gamble pays off, start an AGI company, hire the best people and build an FAI yourself. You could hire existing existential risk charities as consultants when you required their services. You can increase your chance of success in at least some branches by tossing a quantum coin to make key decisions. You could take, say, 50% of the universe for yourself and donate the other 50% to humanity. In your half, you can then create many independent rescue simulations of yourself up to August 2010 (or some other date), who then get rescued and sent to an optimized utopia.
You can also use your resources to acausally trade with a CEV-like singleton that might otherwise punish you for being a partial x-risk reducer, as mentioned before.
You can also use resources to acausally trade [2] with all possible unfriendly AIs [3] that might be built, exchanging resources in branches where you succeed for the uFAI sparing your life and “pensioning you off” with a tiny proportion of the universe in branches where it is built. Given that unfriendly AI is said by many experts to be the most likely outcome of humanity’s experiment with AI this century, having such a lifeboat is no small benefit. Even if you are not an acausal decision-maker and therefore place no value on rescue simulations, many uFAIs would be acausal decision-makers. Though it seems to me that most people one-box on Newcomb’s Problem, and rescue simulations seems decision-theoretically equivalent to Newcomb.
I’m not aware of FTX ever using quantum number generators. The closest thing to Roko’s idea pursued by FTX I could find is Sam’s coin flip philosophy. I think you are mistaken, unless you know something that is not public.
The “quantum billionaire trick” portion of Roko’s original post reads:
I’m not aware of FTX ever using quantum number generators. The closest thing to Roko’s idea pursued by FTX I could find is Sam’s coin flip philosophy. I think you are mistaken, unless you know something that is not public.