"The Basilisk made its first appearance on the discussion board LessWrong, a gathering point for highly analytical sorts interested in optimizing their thinking, their lives, and the world through mathematics and rationality. LessWrong’s founder, Eliezer Yudkowsky, is a significant figure in techno-futurism; his research institute, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, which funds and promotes research around the advancement of artificial intelligence, has been boosted and funded by high-profile techies like Peter Thiel and Ray Kurzweil, and Yudkowsky is a prominent contributor to academic discussions of technological ethics and decision theory. What you are about to read may sound strange and even crazy, but some very influential and wealthy scientists and techies believe it.

"One day, LessWrong user Roko postulated a thought experiment: What if, in the future, a somewhat malevolent AI were to come about and punish those who did not do its bidding? What if there were a way (and I will explain how) for this AI to punish people today who are not helping it come into existence later? In that case, weren’t the readers of LessWrong right then being given the choice of either helping that evil AI come into existence or being condemned to suffer?

"You may be a bit confused, but the founder of LessWrong, Eliezer Yudkowsky, was not. He reacted with horror [quoted in bold below]:

         Listen to me very closely, you idiot.

         YOU DO NOT THINK IN SUFFICIENT DETAIL ABOUT SUPERINTELLIGENCES CONSIDERING WHETHER OR NOT TO BLACKMAIL YOU. THAT IS THE ONLY POSSIBLE THING WHICH GIVES THEM A MOTIVE TO FOLLOW THROUGH ON THE BLACKMAIL.

         You have to be really clever to come up with a genuinely dangerous thought. I am disheartened that people can be clever enough to do that and not clever enough to do the obvious thing and KEEP THEIR IDIOT MOUTHS SHUT about it, because it is much more important to sound intelligent when talking to your friends.

         This post was STUPID.

"Yudkowsky said that Roko had already given nightmares to several LessWrong users and had brought them to the point of breakdown. Yudkowsky ended up deleting the thread completely, thus assuring that Roko’s Basilisk would become the stuff of legend. It was a thought experiment so dangerous that merely thinking about it was hazardous not only to your mental health, but to your very fate" (3).