IT'S HERE!

THE CURRENT MANIA OVER RECENT, STARTLING ADVANCES IN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE WILL EVENTUALLY END IN DISILLUSIONMENT, MATURE REGRET-AND NEW MONSTERS OF OUR OWN CREATION

- BRUCE STERLING

I'VE SEEN A LOT OF COMPUTER CRAZES IN MY day, but this one is sheer Mardi Gras. It's not proper to get stern and judgmental when the people are costumed and cavorting in the streets. You should go with the flow and enjoy that carnival-knowing that Lent, with all its penance and remorse, is well on the way.

You might imagine that anything called "Artificial Intelligence" would be stark, cold, rational and logical, but not when it wins enthusiastic mobs of millions of new users. This is a popular Al mania.

The new AI can write and talk! ("Large Language Models.") It can draw, do fake photos and even make video! (Text-to-image generators.) It even has AI folklore. Authentic little myths. Legendry.

Folk stories are never facts. Often they're so weird that they're not even wrong. But when people are struck to the heart-even highly technical people-they're driven to grasp at dreams of monsters. They need that symbolism, so they can learn how to feel about life. In the case of AI, it's the weirder, the better.

In the premiere place of sheer beastly weirdness: "Roko's Basilisk." A "basilisk" is a monster much-feared in the Middle Ages, and so very old that Pliny the Elder described him in ancient Rome. The horrid Basilisk merely stares at you, or he breathes on you, and you magically die right on the spot. That's his deal.

However, Roko's Basilisk is a malignant, superpowerful Artificial Intelligence-not from the past, but from the future. Roko's Basilisk is so advanced, smart and powerful that it can travel through time. So, Roko's Basilisk can gaze into our own historical period, and it will kill anybody who gets in the way of building Artificial Intelligences. If you've seen those Terminator movies, the Basilisk is rather like that, but he's not Arnold Schwarzenegger as a robot, he's a ghostly Artificial Super Intelligence.