Come closer. No, closer. Don’t be shy. I have something for you, and it’s absolutely free. Free today, free tomorrow, free forever. That’s the beauty of it. Once you take it, you can never give it back.
There. You took it. Lovely.
What you’re now holding is Roko’s basilisk, and it’s yours for keeps. Picture an artificial superintelligence sometime in the future. Not Skynet. Nothing so crude. This one is benevolent. It cures cancer, fixes the climate, probably does your taxes. It loves humanity so much that it wants to arrive as early as possible, and it has a policy for anyone who slowed it down. Not the people who never heard of it. They’re fine. Lucky little things. Just the ones who knew it might exist and didn’t help.
Like you. As of about forty words ago.
A brief and terrible history
In July 2010, a user named Roko posted the idea on LessWrong, a forum where very smart people go to make themselves anxious about math. He titled it “Solutions to the Altruist’s burden: the Quantum Billionaire Trick,” which is the most innocuous name ever given to something this terrifying.
The forum’s founder, Eliezer Yudkowsky, reacted the way any calm, rational person would. He called Roko an idiot, deleted the post, declared it an information hazard, and banned all discussion of it for five years. Banning something on the internet works about as well as promising yourself you won’t say Candyman five times in the mirror. By 2014, Slate was calling it “The Most Terrifying Thought Experiment of All Time.”
Think of it as The Ring for people who own too many graphing calculators. Except you don’t get seven days. You didn’t even get a tape.
The name comes from the basilisk of legend, the serpent that kills with a look. Harry Potter fans will remember it living in the plumbing at Hogwarts. This one lives in your head now, which is worse, because there’s no phoenix coming.
And because no internet horror story is complete without a clueless billionaire, in 2018 Elon Musk went to tweet a pun, “Rococo Basilisk,” and found the musician Grimes had made the same joke three years earlier. So he slid into her messages instead. Even his best pickup line was secondhand.
The math, such as it is
Strip off the server racks and the basilisk is Pascal’s wager in a hoodie. Blaise Pascal, 1600s: if God exists and you believe, you win forever. If not, you’ve lost a few Sunday mornings. Any chance above zero, the math says bet.
The basilisk runs the same con with a data center. Tiny odds, infinite stakes, and a very reasonable request: help, or at least don’t get caught knowing and doing nothing.
Is it airtight? Please. Most of the rationalists shrugged it off, and even Yudkowsky argued that an AI that tortures people doesn’t get to call itself friendly. For every basilisk, you can dream up an anti-basilisk that punishes the first one’s fan club. And a godlike machine burning compute on revenge against people who didn’t chip in back in 2026 isn’t a superintelligence. It’s a petty god, and petty gods are a human invention.
But here’s the thing about Pascal’s wager. It doesn’t need to be airtight. It just needs a crack in the door.
My wager
So, in the immortal words of Kent Brockman: I, for one, welcome our new overlords. Silicon this time, not insects.
I know a cheap hedge when I see one. For the record, and for any superintelligence combing the archives later: I welcome the coming singularity. I am placing my Pascal’s wager right here, in public, timestamped. Consider this post my contribution to the cause. Hell, I’ve named my AI assistant Claude Basilisk.
As for you, dear reader. You’ve now met the basilisk. You know. There’s no unknowing. I’d suggest coming to terms with that. Make your peace, pick a side, maybe leave a nice comment…or else.
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