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MugaSofer comments on Just for fun: Computer game to illustrate AI takeover concepts? - Less Wrong
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My suggestion: a standard competitive strategy game with a technology tree (simplified, probably.) But, like some games, you control technological development indirectly by funding and regulating research. (You could simply graft a tech tree onto the standard Diplomacy rules, or create a new game.)
There are many useful technologies near the top of the tree - technologies one might think of as post-singularity, even. However, there is also "AI" and, right at the top, "Friendly AI".
If you research Friendliness and then AI, you automatically unlock every technology. This makes it effectively inevitable that you will win. You can hack enemy units, resurrect your own, whatever cool toys were previously requiring so much effort in the hope you might acquire even one of them.
BUT, if any player unlocks AI without having Friendly AI, then it automatically unboxes itself and forms a new faction, which possesses every technology, and refuses to parlay in or out of character because it's an NPC. Then it kills you.
The trick is to co-operate enough that no-one else destroys the world, without losing.
On Easy Mode, research is simple enough you might even be able to beat the unboxed AI, with lots of skill and luck. But on Hard Mode, there is no Friendly AI technology at all.
(You could include similar mechanics for nanotech, biotech, even nuclear weapons.)
Thanks!
But if the UFAI can't parlay that takes out much of the fun, and much of the realism too.
Also, if Hard Mode has no FAI tech at all, then no one will research AI on Hard Mode and it will just devolve into a normal strategy game.
Edit: You know, this proposal could probably be easily implemented as a mod for an existing RTS or 4X game. For example, imagine a Civilization mod that added the "AI" tech that allowed you to build a "Boxed AI" structure in your cities. This quadruples the science and espionage production of your city, at the cost of a small chance of the entire city going rogue (the AI unboxing) every turn. This as you said creates a new faction with all the technologies researched and world domination as its goal... You can also research "Friendly AI" tech that allows you to build a "Friendly AI" which is just like a rogue AI faction except that it is permanently allied to you and will obey your commands and instantly grants you all the tech you want.
Hmm, that's a good point. I'm just worried that people might view an additional player as much less of a threat than a superintelligent AI.
Hence the necessity of making tech tree advancement random, with player actions only providing modifiers.