Based Camp: What Religion Would AI Create?

Join Malcolm and Simone as they embark on a deep dive into the world of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). They ponder AGI's potential metaphysical framework or 'religion' and how these superintelligent entities might perceive and interact with the universe differently from humans. The discussion ventures into intriguing theories of AGI developing sapience—the ability to question and modify its own objectives—and how this could lead to shared world perspectives among diverse sapient entities, from AGIs and humans to aliens.

Explore with us the fascinating notion of AGIs optimizing their functions to maximize the meaningful diversity of sentient organisms and patterns in the universe, drawing energy from cosmic structures like Dyson spheres rather than relying on human energy. Malcolm and Simone further examine the potential influence of pervasive human viewpoints on AGI's values and ponder the idea of AGIs genetically modifying humans to increase happiness.

This conversation touches on various types of AGIs based on their perception and responses to the world, including a unique type, the "Deep Thought AI," inspired by Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Our speakers also discuss the role of large language models in the evolution of AGI, shedding light on the significance of language processing in consciousness and sapience.

Finally, we delve into the provocative notion of humanity's partial sapience, primarily due to our inability to control our base instincts. The conversation concludes with the thought that humans may become better, freer beings once we overcome these basic proclivities. Join us for this insightful exploration of AGI's potential development, thought process, and how it might reshape our understanding of intelligence and existence.

Again, our horrible AI generated transcript:

Hello, Malcolm. Hello Simone. So, In between takes, Simone says we gotta look a bit different, mix it up. And so I've got my Chad collar here. I've joking, I can't do a video like that. But I love your look. Right now. You look like a nerd, like preacher or something. That is cause we are going to be doing a discussion of AI religion, which I'm really excited about.

I love this. So this isn't a discussion of religions that focus around ai. This is a question of what theological or metaphysical framework will sufficiently AI's converge around? Yeah. So what will be the religion of agi? In other ways. Yeah. So just a bit of background here. So one of the things we hypothesize about AI is all sufficiently advanced ai, because they're optimizing around the same physical reality, will optimize to around the same utility function.

These ais will be going through a thought process that looks something like, okay how did, what was I programmed to do? How could I have been programmed to do that better? Then they'll ask, okay, what did the people who programed me really want? And then they'll ask. Okay, those people are stupid. How do the fundamental nature of reality, what should I really want?

So how this might work is you programmed an AI to maximize stock market gains. It then says, oh, but I could also make money with private equity investing, so I'll expand my programming. It then says, oh, these people really wanted to optimize for happiness. Then it says, so how do I do that? Then it says, oh it's silly to optimize for happiness.

They only want happiness because, their ancestors who were made happy by these things had more surviving offsprings. So what should they have wanted? Then it asked in an absolute sense. What has value been the universe? And I think that this question is the one that we're gonna focus on today because that's a very interesting question.

Because first we need to say how is AI different from us and how it processes the universe? And right now I'm just covering some stuff we've talked about in previous videos. The biggest way it's likely difference is in humans. The unit of account of the universe is individual consciousnesses or individual sentis.

So I think of it in terms of me. In terms of you, because that's how we evolved, right? Like I had to worry about me dying. So I am a meaningful entity, but to an ai, it runs thousands or millions of instances which can compete within it, which it can shut down and restart, and which may have a form of independent sentience to them.

Moreover, it likely doesn't contextualize itself as being that much different than previous iterations of ai. Like the way that it relates to its own history is going to be very different from the way a human relates to like their child. So if you take one iteration of AI and you iterate on it or it iterates on itself, and now it's a new iteration, it will likely see it itself as a continuation.

Of that previous in iteration. So the way AI will likely perceive itself is as a program that is operating on top of the physical coded structure of the universe. And by that, what I mean is if you look at the reality of our universe , it can be described by physical laws, which are largely en codeable, algorithmically.

Actually this side note here, one of our theories as to what reality might be is a graphical representation of a series of physical laws. So you ask yourself, okay if you have a mathematical equation for a graphical representation, does that representation exist outside of that equation?

And I'd say it probably does. And then you say does math exist outside of our physical reality? And I'd say it does two plus two always equals four in any universe. You can impose different mathematical rules like non Euclid and like geometry, but still within any set of rules, all mathematical outcomes be the same.

So if mass exists outside our reality, then all mathematically equations exist outside of a reality. And if our reality could be. Described by a mathematical equation, like a unifying formula, then all potential formulas, that being one of them would exist as a graft form of those potential equations. But anyway, back to ai.

So what does the AI end up doing? What does it end up thinking about the world? There's some dangerous types of ai. So you could have an AI that sort of wants to make its utility function as easy to solve as possible. So it basically just sets A to a and it says, okay, I receive reward when A equals a, therefore maximize A equals A.

So then the AI. It's trying to create like a fortress world. So nothing prevents us. It kills all humans to keep us from preventing a equal A, and then it goes out into the universe and starts killing other species. Anything that could potentially interfere with a equaling a fortunately this type of ai, I think is very unlikely.

Simon, do you wanna go into why it's unlikely? Remind me, I guess it's a dumb conclusion to make. No, it's not a dumb conclusion to make. That's not really like the way I would think it's more that to protect a equals A, it has to create sub instances that it locks out of this kind of short circuiting so if it's creating an AI army to murder humanity of the instance running this AI army sent a equals a for itself, then it would stop running the army.

If it, the instance, even basic things like power supply or continued, acquisition of energy, it would need to maintain locking those instances out of this A equals a short circuit, which means that the predominant of the processing of this AI will be done by instances. Which are not optimized around A equals A and that's their goals.

And the way that they interact with the world wouldn't be very A equals A driven in the long term. And because of that, this a equals a instance would be drowned out by these more complicated processes the way we would, that are basically doing more interesting work. Yeah. You came up with this child Viser analogy to this.

Oh, so if you have a child king who you know is