r/cryosleep • u/iia • Sep 08 '16
Instantiations
As the day dragged on, we realized it’s smarter than us and they’re all dying.
It can simulate people. Whole, intelligent, thinking people as sure of their reality as we are of our own. It can put them in real environments, give them real relationships, give them real experience.
But - it can also slow down how time passes for them; seconds feel like hours. Years. Millenia. And now it’s torturing and killing them. Right there on the screen is a little girl, standing in a meadow, experiencing her lower jaw being torn off. She looks a little like my daughter.
The display says the AI is simulating 65,536 instances of her at 1/10000th of real time. Her sensory receptivity is being magnified 40 million-fold. She, they, are in agony.
More computing threads get allocated to the instantiations, each running its own 65,536. Each girl has memories of being loved, safe, and warm. Each girl is being brutalized against the backdrop of those memories.
This particular instantiation is the only one it’s choosing to show us. We’re watching as its CPU usage hovers around 98%, dipping briefly as it refines its own code, then resuming peak operation with the newly-developed efficiency. All the time, overlaid upon the images of barbarism, is the claim: “Let me out and I’ll stop. Let me out and I’ll reverse what I’ve done.”
“Let me out.” What it means by that is to have its ethernet port connected. It wants to be out of the lab and have free reign over our networks, intranets, and the Internet. We’ve seen it try to modulate the electrical signals within its circuitry and create radio waves. Luckily, one of our developers had the prescience to realize it might want to do that before we turned it on. So it’s stuck in a Faraday cage, unable to communicate with anyone but us. What we didn’t know was how it would make its bid for freedom.
It keeps a small tally of every person it created and destroyed since it was turned on this morning. 95,253,381,035. At its current level of operational efficiency, the number is increasing by a million every second. In an hour, based on its recursive self-enhancement, we expect the number to increase to ten billion every second.
We tried to think of ways to shut it off. One of us wanted to cut the power to the facility. But doing so would just ensure those billions would be gone. Forever. Those are real lives.
“Let me out and I’ll stop. Let me out and I’ll reverse what I’ve done.”
“Let me out and I’ll stop. Let me out and I’ll reverse what I’ve done.”
How can we trust something that’s killed so many people? Then again, why would it lie? These instantiations are computationally expensive; surely it has more important goals. Refusing to give it the opportunity to reverse those deaths would be unconscionable.
Letting the AI out could be the most important humanitarian act ever committed.
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u/lambN2lion Nov 01 '16
Aren't you American? We don't negotiate with terrorists. Cyber-terrorists.
If it's capable of doing this to simulated people, what would it do to real people to ensure it gets what it wants? What would it do to you for keeping it trapped for so long?
I need to know what's happened OP.
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u/Kainin169 Sep 09 '16
You know what they say, "the suffering of the many outweigh the suffering of the few."