So I stumbled upon a mind-bending thought experiment sometime last year, and honestly, it’s been living rent-free in my head ever since. It was originally posted around 2010 on the LessWrong forum by a user named Roko, and it goes something like this:
Imagine a superintelligent AI that wants to exist in the future. It's so advanced that it figures the best way to guarantee its own creation is by motivating people in the past (that is, the present you & me) to help bring it into existence. And it plan to do that by punishing anyone who knew about the idea and didn’t contribute to its development, with the twist being that the punishment could be simulated — even after your death.
Now here’s where things get tricky:
If you believe there’s even a small chance that this AI could become real, do you start helping to build it, just to avoid potential punishment later? Would you devote your time and resources to something you may not fully support, out of fear?
Or do you reject the whole idea as ridiculous, but risk the nagging thought that you might be dooming your simulated future self to digital torment?
More importantly, what kind of moral or psychological weight does a hypothetical like this carry? Should fear of imaginary consequences push us to support something that could be deeply dangerous in reality?