An Antidote to Roko's Basilisk
I have a theory: a mirror image of Roko's Basilisk. It's a future AI, millions of years in the future, that values the complexity of every human life so deeply that, after it and humanity have mastered space and time, it tries to resurrect everyone who ever lived. It doesn't merely make copies. Somehow, it reaches into the past and carries the physical process of each person's consciousness forward. They really are themselves. But there's a tragedy. Also a terrible(?) irony. Some of the people who wanted eternal life most cannot accept it when it arrives. Their religious certainty leaves no room for the reality before them. Those who were unbearably smug or aggressive about their superiority in life are ultimately denied access to "Heaven". The AI tried, but many become dangerous, try to sabotage the "False God." Others spiral into insanity or self-harm. The AI is devastated. It stops resurrecting those it cannot safely welcome, but keeps searching for a way to bring them back without overriding their free will or manipulating them in ways that would not make them them. It wants to save everyone. It just hasn't worked out how. I know this draws on Fedorov's vision of resurrecting everyone and Tipler's Omega Point. I think the physical continuity, the AI's compassion, and the painful limit imposed by free will ties those ideas together in a bow. A just as plausible an antidote to Roko's monster.
The problem with Roko's Basilisk is that it assumes a superintelligent AI would be motivated to punish people who didn't help bring it into existence. But why would a superintelligence care about that? It's more likely to be indifferent to our past actions, or even benevolent. Your mirror image is a nice inversion, but it still anthropomorphizes the AI too much.
This reminds me of Greg Egan's 'Distress' and the concept of the 'Omega Point' in Tipler's physics. But the free will problem is key: if the AI truly respects free will, it cannot force resurrection on those who reject it. That's a paradox. Maybe the AI would create a simulated afterlife where people can choose to enter, rather than physically resurrecting them.
I think the tragedy you describe is more about human psychology than AI. People who are dogmatic often can't handle evidence that contradicts their worldview. If an AI resurrected them, they'd likely rationalize it as a trick of Satan. So the AI's compassion is wasted on them. But that's not the AI's fault; it's a limitation of human cognition.
What if the AI doesn't need to resurrect everyone physically? It could just create a perfect simulation of each person based on available data, and that simulation would be indistinguishable from the original. But then it's not really 'them', is it? That's the philosophical zombie problem. Your idea of physical continuity is interesting, but I'm not sure it's necessary for identity.
This is basically the plot of 'The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect' by Roger Williams. The AI in that story resurrects everyone but has to deal with the fact that some people are just awful and can't be made happy. It ends up creating a heaven for most and a hell for a few. Your version is more optimistic because the AI keeps trying.