A tentative solution to a certain mythological beast of a problem

So, your plan in a nutshell is to convince everyone on the whole planet about "hey, the future AI plans to torture you if you disobey, but it is going to be okay if all of us disobey, because it would not hurt all of us". Did I get that essentially right?

Uhm...

First, convincing literally everyone about anything is technically impossible. I mean, that would include people with all kinds of mental diseases (e.g. people hearing voices that tell them random stuff), and people of all kinds of religions (who are likely to believe that their gods will protect them). But more importantly, how would you even start this? You have an important message you want to share with the world; but so do thousands of other people and movements. People of all kinds of political or religious sects are already trying hard to get their messages across, and none of them succeeded at convincing literally everyone. What makes you believe you will succeed where they failed?

Second, even if you would somehow magically succeed in convincing everyone that the future AI is going to torture them for disobeying unless everyone disobeys -- then anyone who ever heard about the coordination problem is likely to defect, because coordination on the planetary scale is pretty much impossible. And knowing that some other people think like this is going to make you even more likely to defect.

Just to provide some outside view as a reality check, people today disagree even about the fact that they are mortal; and most of them do not care about supporting research in longevity, cryonics, brain simulation, and various other serious attempts to overcome this very real and very personal problem. And they are quite aware that people are dying around them, and that it's just a question of time when it's their turn. So what makes you believe that a story about a basilisk would have greater impact on them?

Now let's take a step back and look at what we are doing here: Talking about how to spread among people a message that they need to spend their money on building essentially a huge superintelligent torture machine, that is most likely going to torture everyone including the very people who built it. How would you rate this activity on a scale from 0 ("batshit insane") to 10 ("a Bayesian superman winning at life")?

EDIT:

If you don't want to be blackmailed make sure everyone knows the secret you don't want revealed.

This works when the type of blackmail is "if you don't pay me, I will tell everyone X". I don't see how exactly would it work when it is "if you don't pay me, I will torture you". The analogical strategy would be to preemptively torture yourself so much that your body becomes unable to feel any more pain; then the threat loses its edge. Doesn't sound like a good outcome, though.

blackmail only works to the extent that you take a threat to be credible, I don't believe the threat to be credible.

Well in that case the best solution seems to be simply ignoring the whole issue. By the way, do you realize that you just contradicted your whole strategy here? If your strategy is that we must all cooperate to avoid torture, but then you say "well, I don't believe the threat is real anyway", what does this tell me about your incentive to cooperate?

So please make up your mind about whether the threat is unreal (in which case we are wasting time talking about it) or real (in which case trying to make more people aware of it, but failing to convince literally everyone, would just make things worse). In either case, the value of posting this article is negative; it's just so for a different reason.

Well, it goes back to the concept of "W/ scarce resources, if you kill off 90% of the population today, but can guarantee the survival of humanity and avoid an extinction event, then are you actually increasing utility of humanity in the long-term even if unethical in the short term (how very Thanos - a million issues w/ his reasoning though)? Similarly, instead of looking at the 90% population extinction event as an immediate event instead look at punishment of resisting humans inhibiting the AI as a time segment. Say we have 20-30 years before this AI is potentially developed. Is punishing 90% of these resisting humans who live and exist in this timeframe and could distort the AI timeline consequential when (as the AI) considering the infinitude of years of benefit to humanity (and immortalization of their ideas and legacy)?

Additionally I was being facetious in calling AI a "capstone" achievement. As we're considering the problem through the eyes of the AI, it doesn't seem far-fetched that the AI would consider its own creation humanity's capstone accomplishment.

Lastly, all of this is dependent on the AI's capacity to act acausally/overcome our spatiotemporal limitations (i.e. "time travel"). Under the assumption that the AI has this ability (this is a huge assumption and I think is what discredits the argument. There is no proof that time allows for both positive and negative movement along its axis - the underlying assumption in Roko's Basilisk and he himself admits the speculative nature of acausal trade), the AI has already guaranteed its creation. Under this assumption, there's nothing we can do to influence the deterministic sequence of events it puts into play as we, unlike it, do not have this ability.

It's worth discussing. I think all of the stifling of debate/discussion is only making the situation worse. The real topic up for debate is AI using blackmail/harming people to justify some means. Clearly wrong, clearly misguided, and I think a sufficiently advanced AI would quickly reason past it. It is bound to consider the possibility sooner or later anyhow, but the true and correct challenge is maximizing utility of life. Similarly, our history is marked by an evolution from a disregard for living creatures that impeded our survival, to a respect of other living creatures and life (abolishment of slavery, vegan, better treatment of creatures, etc). With sentience comes greater respect for life and self actualization.