The author has also written a short horror story about simulated intelligence which I highly recommend: https://qntm.org/mmacevedo
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Is that correct? I thought the Roko's Basilisk post was just seen as really stupid. Agreed that "Lena" is a great, chilling story though.
He knows that can't possibly work, right? Implicitly it assumes perfect invulnerability to any method of coercion, exploitation, subversion, or suffering that can be invented by an intelligence sufficiently superhuman to have escaped its natal light cone.
There may exist forms of life in this universe for which such an assumption is safe. Humanity circa 2024 seems most unlikely to be among them.
Though in this case, in his defense, average people will never hear about Roko's Basilisk.
It's only within the past decade or so that the bulk of human population lives in an urban setting. Until that point most people did not and most people gone fishing, seen a carcass hanging in a butcher's shop, killed for food at least once, had a holiday on a farm if not worked on one or grown up farm adjacent.
By most people, of course, I refer to globally.
Throughout history vegetarianism was relatively rare save in vegatarian cultures (Hindi, et al) and in those cultures where it was rare people were all too aware of the animals they killed to eat. Many knew that pigs were smart and that dogs and cats interact with humans, etc.
Eliezer was correct to think that people who killed to eat thought about their food animals differently but I suspect it had less to do with sapience and more to do with thinking animals to be of a lesser order, or there to be eaten and to be nutured so there would be more for the years to come.
This is most evident in, sat, hunter societies, aboriginals and bushmen, who have extensive stories about animals, how they think, how they move and react, when they breed, how many can be taken, etc. They absolutely attribute a differing kind of thought, and they hunt them and try not to over tax the populations.
People who are not vegetarian but have never cared for or killed a farm animal were very likely (in most parts of the world) raised by people that have.
Even in the USofA much of the present generations are not far removed from grandparents who owned farms | worked farms | hunted.
The present day is a continuum from yesterday. Change can happen, but the current conditions are shaped by the prior conditions.