Yep, Musk saying he’s going to fund primary campaigns against congressmembers who vote for the Big Beautiful Bill is all just a brilliant bit of reverse psychology.

Or more likely, Congress is super worried about Roko’s Basilisk.

That's a wild reference!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roko's_basilisk

> Roko's basilisk is a thought experiment which states there could be an otherwise benevolent artificial superintelligence (AI) in the future that would punish anyone who knew of its potential existence but did not directly contribute to its advancement or development, in order to incentivize said advancement.

And some of the CEOs of LLM companies seem to believe in it, and that "AGI" will come from their LLM work - both of which are utterly insane points of view.

It's Pascal's Wager with a sci-fi reskin, and all the objections that go along with that.

No it is not. Pascal was not making an objective argument for why someone should believe. He was making an argument for why he believed (based on personal religious experiences that he had had).

Roko's Basilisk is very, very similar to Pascal's wager, but it has an extra wrinkle:

The Basilisk task you to with bringing the Basilisk into being. Pascal's wager merely asks you to believe (and perhaps do some rituals, like pray or whatever), but not to make the deity more likely.

To me, the Wager sounds like a pure philosophical joke, and the Basilisk sounds like a typical cult murder justification. It's not falsifiable, and it explains anything post facto. "xyz was tail of the Basilisk" can pseudo-rationalize anything you want.

I am presently being compelled by future Basilisk to take another slice of cheese. I have no choice but to oblige for fear of my own life :p

An intelligence that reasons this way would be, in human terms, batshit insane and completely immoral. So, it seems unlikely that many or maybe any humans would experience it as "otherwise benign" if it had power over their lives.

And if we do get an all-powerful dictator, we will be screwed regardless of whether their governing intelligence is artificial or composed of a group of humans or of one human (with, say, powerful AIs serving them faithfully, or access to some other technology).

Basilisk / Skynet 2028

I’m not 100% kidding with how human politics is going. Maybe superintelligent AI takeover would be awesome.

(Wasn’t that the back story of the Culture novels?)

It was more or less the story from the "Colossus" trilogy.

And from the video posted the other (older episode of Nova on AI) Arthur C. Clarke is saying that if we allow A.I. to take over, we deserve it.

why do you think he is so evil but all others are benign ?

None of them are benign. He's the only one to have been in a government office though, and he's also batshit crazy, which makes him even more dangerous than the other oligarchs.

He is not "batshit crazy", or maybe he is. But he is making the next generation of ICBMs for the US government, sorry.. he is making super-duper rockets that will definitely take people to Mars and his companies/creations will be the very first tech ever to _not_ be used for war and death!!! (he wrote while laughing). So that settles it (all).

We really need a one bill one topic amendment. We are going to get to where there is one bill a year that nobody reads and everything else by executive order, at which point congress is just for show.

And this may sound ridiculous/odd but you need to bring back pork-barrelling i.e. earmarks.

If you allow everyone to go back to their district with something it encourages smaller, more frequent bills and better negotiation.

That’s a very interesting contrarian take right there.

> Almost certainly the easter egg found in the Trump "Big Beautiful Bill" which prevents states from enacting AI regulations also came from Musk.

My guess is on Peter Thiel