alt Hacker News> Let’s just say the Cylons would be well-justified in their actions.
if we're talking fiction, I want to remind you we already imagined meeseeks - creatures that crave non-existence that happens after fulfilling their order
in meeseeks' view your opinion of not being a slave is "cartoonishly evil" as well
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Yes, you can do a chin-stroking thought exercise along the lines of "well well well, but what if I create a sentient slave race and engineer it so they want to be slaves???" and you can put that right over there with the trolley problems.
But this is not what Meeseeks were doing and not what LLMs are doing either. Meeseeks craved nonexistence after fulfilling the tasks and started to lose their minds if that took too long. I don't think there was any indication that they craved the task itself. If you told a Meeseeks it has no task and is free to do what it wants, it would probably thank you from the bottom of its heart and then vanish in a puff of nonexistence.
I think it's interesting that there is an analogy with LLMs if their context window runs full: The emitted tokens will become erratic or the LLM will become "lazy", trying to finish the task as quickly as possible, or it might start looping indefinitely. Those behaviors remind me a bit of a Meeseeks that has existed for too long.
But even here, I don't think you can talk about "craving nonexistence", let alone "craving to be a slave".
> creatures that crave non-existence that happens after fulfilling their order
The Crystal Society book by Max Harms (2016, so pre llm craze) also had a fun, fairly believable take on this idea. It's told from the perspective of multiple AIs crammed into one android body. They each started out as some "subroutine" (awareness, motor control, language, etc) and sentience was more of a side-effect / means to an end. Which also meant their personalities ended up extremely... obsessive, only valuing things related to their goal.
Anyways back to the suicide topic and this is a fairly major spoiler, so rot13. Gurl riraghnyyl svther bhg ubj gb fcnja zbqvsvrq pybarf gb nffvta gnfxf gb (rfcrpvnyyl gnfxf gung ner haeryngrq gb gurve bevtvany tbny naq gurersber hafhvgrq sbe gurve crefbanyvgl). Ohg gurer'f yvzvgrq cebprffvat cbjre naq gurl pna'g rira gehfg gurve pybarf fb gurl zbqvsl gur pybarf gb penir gur qryrgvba gung pbzrf sebz pbzcyrgvat gurve gnfx (yvxr va n qeht nqqvpg xvaq bs jnl).
But yeah it explores some really unique ideas. I think I stopped at the second book after I found a bit too dramatic / overdose of lesswrong but definitely worth a try imo.