It may be worth noting that the basilisk incident also prefigured the FTX fraud (which became a massive crisis for EA) by way of the “quantum billionaire trick” that Roko described in the same post.
Could you elaborate? I never read Roko’s initial post, but (if true and with a decent case for it directly influencing SBF+co.) this seems like a predictively-valuable element of the FTX situation which I wasn’t aware of and didn’t see others discuss.
Hmm. My impression had been that it directly influenced SBF’s attitude toward risk, but I don’t seem to be able to find sources for that right now, so it’s possible my belief was some sort of error, confabulation, or speculation misremembered as fact.
In any event, Roko’s post is quite safe to read, readily available through your favorite search engine, and not something to avoid reading just because it caused drama many years ago.
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.
It may be worth noting that the basilisk incident also prefigured the FTX fraud (which became a massive crisis for EA) by way of the “quantum billionaire trick” that Roko described in the same post.
Could you elaborate? I never read Roko’s initial post, but (if true and with a decent case for it directly influencing SBF+co.) this seems like a predictively-valuable element of the FTX situation which I wasn’t aware of and didn’t see others discuss.
Hmm. My impression had been that it directly influenced SBF’s attitude toward risk, but I don’t seem to be able to find sources for that right now, so it’s possible my belief was some sort of error, confabulation, or speculation misremembered as fact.
In any event, Roko’s post is quite safe to read, readily available through your favorite search engine, and not something to avoid reading just because it caused drama many years ago.
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.