Pandaemonium Architecture 6.0

In this course

Yudkowsky is a public intellectual and founder of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute known for advocating "friendly AI" safety—the idea that superintelligent systems pose existential risks requiring proactive alignment research. The readings invoke him obliquely through Roko's Basilisk, a thought experiment posted on Yudkowsky's LessWrong forum that weaponizes AI risk discourse into psychological coercion, prompting the course to examine how AI safety rhetoric can become a vector for anxiety and manipulation. His work appears here less as substantive theory than as a cultural phenomenon—the readings use the Basilisk's viral panic to interrogate how AI futurism produces real psychological effects and moral captivity among believers.

Mentioned in 3 readings

Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres

The TESCREAL bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence

17

Singularitarianism. Around the same time that the WTA was founded, another variant of transhumanism emerged: singularitarianism, whose leading advocates included Ray Kurzweil and Eliezer Yudkowsky. This emphasized the coming “technological …Rationalism. In the late 2000s, yet another community arose: the Rationalists. This centered around the community blogging website LessWrong, founded in 2009 by Yudkowsky, which describes itself as “an online forum and community dedicated t…Discriminatory attitudes. The same discriminatory attitudes that animated first-wave eugenics are pervasive within the TESCREAL literature and community. For example, the Extropian listserv contains numerous examples of alarming remarks by …

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Isabel Millar

from The Psychoanalysis of Artificial Intelligence

3

In 2010 on LessWrong forum, a user named Roko posited a thought experiment. He proposed that in a hypothetical future an all-powerful super-intelligent AI could retrospectively punish anyone who in the present time did not do everything in …This post was STUPID (ibid.).[^1] The post was subsequently removed, and all talk of the Basilisk was banned from the website for over five years. But the Basilisk had already wreaked havoc among the forum’s readers many of whom had starte…Auerbach, D (2014) The Most Terrifying Thought Experiment of All Time. Available (01.03.2020) at: https://slate.com/technology/2014/07/rokos-basilisk-the-most-terrifying-thought-experimentof-all-time.html Lacan, J. (2006a) ‘Logical Time and…

Nick Bostrom

Are You Living In A Computer Simulation?

1

If (1) is true, then we will almost certainly go extinct before reaching posthumanity. If (2) is true, then there must be a strong convergence among the courses of advanced civilizations so that virtually none contains any relatively wealth…

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