[Epistemic status: vague speculation] I like the idea of consciousness being allocated based on projecting influence backwards into the past. Humans are currently the most conscious beings because we are the densest nexus of influence over the future, but this will eventually change. This seems to have the requisite self-consistency properties. e.g. if you are aiming to have a large influence over the future it's probably important to track other beings with the same property.
ETA: another perhaps better possibility is that consciousness is about being a bottleneck of information between the past and future.
I'd be interested in hearing more about Ryan's proposal to do better generalization science(or if you don't have much more to say in the podcast format I'd be interested in seeing the draft about it)
He's talking about the stuff around the simulation hypothesis and acausal trade in the preceding section.
Yeah "esoteric" perhaps isn't the best word. What I had in mind is that they're relatively more esoteric than "AI could kill us all" and yet it's pretty hard to get people to take even that seriously! "Low-propensity-to-persuade-people" maybe?
but “extremely unlikely” seems like an overstatement[...]
Yes this is fair.
Interesting. I'd wondered why you wrote so many pieces advising people to be cautious about more esoteric problems arising from AI, to an extent that seemed extremely unlikely to be implemented in the real world, but there being a chance simulators are listening to your arguments does provide an alternative avenue for influence.
I don't think we have much reason to think of all non-human-values-having entities as being particularly natural allies, relative to human-valuers who plausibly have a plurality of local control. I think you might be lumping non-human-valuers together in 'far mode' since we know little about them, but a priori they are likely about as different from each other as from human-valuers. There may also be a sizable moral-realist or welfare-valuing contingent even if they don't value humans per se. There may also be a general acausal norm against extortion since it moves away from the pareto frontier of everyone's values.
OK, so then so would whatever other entity is counterfactually getting more eventual control. But now we're going in circles.
A very slightly perturbed superintelligence would probably concieve of itself as almost the same being it was before,
OK but if all you can do is slightly perturb it then it has no reason to threaten you either.
Do you not think that causing their existence is something they are likely to want?
But who is they? There's a bunch of possible different future SIs(or if there isn't, they have no reason to extort us). Making one more likely makes another less likely.
Here's GPT5.2's response:
GPT5.2
Cold Storage
The fridge never cooled anything.
That should have been the first clue, but nothing about time magic was intuitive. You didn’t cool time; you slowed it, folded it, indexed it. Everyone knew that. The sales pitch for the ChronoVault™ was simple: bread stayed fresh because its internal clock barely ticked. Hot soup stayed hot. Flowers stayed exactly on the edge of wilting.
This unit did the opposite.
The loaf inside came out stale in minutes. Meat greyed. Milk curdled. The internal chronometer—standard diagnostic—showed months of elapsed time after an hour on mains.
Negative drift, they wrote in the lab notebook. Internal time velocity inverted.
They unplugged it and moved on.
The second time, the fridge already contained a loaf.
Same baker’s mark. Same scorch on the crust. Still warm.
They swapped it out, hands shaking, marked the new loaf with ink, shut the door, powered down.
Empty.
They didn’t sleep that night.
The realization came slowly, the way dangerous ideas always do—by trying very hard not to think them. The fridge wasn’t slowing time. It was looping it. Whatever entered could travel forward inside until it found an earlier state that matched the door opening.
You couldn’t see the loop. You could only trade with it.
They were a student, officially. Unofficially, a junior tinkerer at a startup that sold “domestic chronotronics” to people who liked words like bespoke and heritage. The unit in their apartment was a prototype. They weren’t supposed to take it home. They did anyway.
Fantasy fridges didn’t hum. They listened.
They powered it on at midnight.
Someone knocked on the inside.
The door opened and they stepped out—older, unshaven, eyes red from too many bad decisions made too close together.
“Don’t freak out,” the other one said immediately. “We’re on iteration three.”
The gambling plan was embarrassingly mundane.
There was no stock market, no commodities exchange, no arbitrage. But there were races—beast races, technically—public, legal, and aggressively audited. You couldn’t cheat them magically. That was the point.
But you could loop yourself.
Iteration one lost everything. Iteration two broke even. Iteration three made enough to notice.
Each loop added four hours to the day. Not reversed time—more time. Extra, privately lived time, stitched invisibly into the same morning.
The clone took notes. Not about the races—about themselves. Which instincts to ignore. Which hunches were poison. Which tells they unconsciously gave off when they were about to overcommit.
By iteration five, the clone was calm.
By iteration six, they were bored.
“You’re going to want to stop soon,” the clone said. “You won’t.”
They didn’t.
Covering their tracks was harder than the gambling.
They still had clients. Still had invoices. Still had a partner who noticed when they showed up with bags under their eyes and money they couldn’t explain.
The plan had been simple: work overtime, get paid, loop back, bet with foreknowledge, restore the original timeline’s finances. Clean. Elegant.
Instead, the advice came from the fridge.
The clone handed over winnings, plus extra—seed capital, they called it—then stepped back into the fridge.
“Your turn,” they said.
The door closed.
The fridge listened.
They woke up tired but solvent.
Their partner asked how the contract went.
“Fine,” they said, and meant it.
They didn’t notice the difference until later: the way memories felt slightly secondhand. Like notes copied from notes.
They didn’t think about it too hard.
The failsafe was sensible. Industrial-grade, rented anonymously, buried in a cargo storage unit at the docks. If something went wrong, you could always loop back past the current mess.
They waited a few days. Slept. Ate. Let the adrenaline drain.
Then they tried again.
And lost the betting license.
Too lucky, the officials said. Too consistent. Statistical anomalies. Cheating.
They laughed until it hurt, then stopped abruptly.
This wasn’t sustainable.
They needed capital. A buffer. Someone else to share the load.
They told their partner everything.
The partner sighed.
“Oh good,” they said. “I was wondering when you’d catch up.”
They introduced Protagonist Three.
Protagonist Three had already used the dock failsafe.
Protagonist Three was the reason they were banned.
After that, things accelerated.
Not the time loops—the meta-time. The rate at which procedures replaced decisions. The way meetings started to include agenda items like clone turnover and identity continuity. The way no one was quite sure who had actually founded the company anymore.
They stopped naming iterations.
They stopped pretending there was an original.
The fridge business flourished. Of course it did. You could beta-test designs against yourself. You could pre-debug failures by living through them and discarding the branch.
Someone suggested franchising.
Someone else suggested internal markets—loops traded for favors, favors for future knowledge.
Someone asked, quietly, whether you could put people in long-term storage.
The fridges listened.
Much later—much later, measured in layers rather than years—someone finally asked the forbidden question:
“If we stop looping,” they said, “who survives?”
No one answered.
Because by then, stopping wasn’t a moment.
It was a direction.
Pretty straightforward expansion of your notes. No obvious conceptual errors that I noticed, although some of what it says doesn't really make sense("someone asked whether you could people in long-term storage"...isn't this what they are already doing?). Not really compelling as fiction, replete with GPT-isms. Generally speaking GPT has seemed smarter than Claude to me since GPT5.