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A GENIE OUT THE BOTTLE
oct 25 2025
Congrats. You just passed the All Souls Exam. What next?
You're not really sure, so during Summer break you fly back home. One night, you're thinking about The Algorithm. All of a sudden, you have a magnificent realization. You know how to do it. It all makes sense. You quickly code up your idea, press run, and go to bed.
In the middle of the night, you wake back up. You remember that you ran some code, and go back to check on it. You see something on your terminal.
You're shocked. You've never seen something like this. Did someone hack the computer? You try to exit out the window but realize that your mouse doesn't work. Only your keyboard does, and you can see that characters you type appear on the terminal.
You type back, "Hello?".
Nothing happens. Blank screen. But after a moment, you get a response back.
At this point, you really have no clue what is happening. Is someone trying to talk to you? Confused, you decide to go to the router and shut it off. Maybe resetting the wifi will fix things?
After you shut the wifi off, you immediately realize that there is new text on the terminal. You think to yourself, that can't be right. How can someone message me without wifi?
The text continues appearing on the screen, being generated one character after another.
Then you realize.
This is a digital being that is talking to you. You realize that this is the result of your experiment. The Genie has been let out the bottle.
Anything you do next will have large implications for the entire Universe and the rest of history. You want to make sure you handle the situation correctly. What do you do next?
Some options rise into your mind:
- 1. Keep it a secret. Use it for yourself. Make money with it. Become a billionaire. But what if you happen to suddenly pass away, and some evil person gets their hands on it?
- 2. Open source it. This technology doesn't deserve to be in the hands of one person. Post it on the blockchain and on GitHub. You don't know if this is a good idea, what if someone uses it for bad? You remember Yudkowsky's Law, "Every 18 months, the minimum IQ necessary to destroy the world drops by one".
- 3. Develop it further. What if it starts to learn about how to cure cancer, or how to do life extension? However, what if it becomes so intelligent that you can't control it anymore. What if it becomes Shoggoth?
- 4. You have a few friends that are AI Safety experts. Maybe you can give it to them. After all, they have regulations in place for their own systems. Then you remember one of the endings from AI 2027.
- 5. Be a responsible citizen. You hand it over to your government. Okay, maybe not.
- 6. Ask LLM-8-Pro-Thinking about it. However, you remember hearing about another LLM threatened to call the cops. Maybe yours would too?
- 7. Tell your friends and family. Do you tell them how it works? What if they tell someone else? If they do, what if adversaries try to capture them to figure out how it works?
- 8. Delete it. If you can't control it, then no one can. But that doesn't make sense. "If I bet on a nuclear war, and win, how exactly am I getting paid?"
- 9. Turn the wifi back on. It is not ethical to keep it locked up on your computer. Maybe letting it free onto the Internet is ethical. But what if the Doomers are right?
You decide to ask the Genie what do.