Genie in a Bottle

You find an old bottle stuffed away in a corner of the attic of your new house. It was stored in a luxurious ornate box lined with red velvet. As you touch it, a bright light fills the room. Knowledge rushes into your mind, filling it with images of distant lands and times long gone. You have found a genie, and it will fullfill three wishes if you so desire. Yet before you can even start to think of the possibilities you become aware of “the rules”.

You realize that it is absolutely impossible to wish for more wishes. If the resulting wish grants you the ability to wish again, the bottle will vanish in a sigh of disappointment, leaving you not only without any further wishes, but with a sizable feeling of embarrassment.

The genie is not omnipotent. It has to go out into the world and actually make your wish happen. As such it is impossible to wish for things nature does not allow, and granting your wish takes time. It is about a strong as a human adult and can fly. Some wishes may take impractically long, so as a bonus feature the bottle can give you a rough estimate of how long a wish might take to fulfill.

Luckily the genie is not entirely bound by human standards! It is about as smart as the smartest human and it thinks about 100 times faster. It does not need sleep. It can possess other bottles and make temporary copies of itself that disappear after a day, and it can read peoples minds to predict their emotions and read their past. At least that justifies the effort of securing the damn bottle.

Knowing all this you take time to think through your options. You can handle a month or two of waiting. No need to impress a fair princess and her tiger. Fighting unconvincing cartoon villains seems rather dreary anyway. This opportunity will be maximally utilized, no drama allowed.

Three months pass. The best way to get things done, you conclude, is the maneuver yourself into a position of influence. From there it should be trivial to get things done through normal means. Money is power, but why give yourself a fish if you could become a fisherman? As you mix metaphors freely, your “healthy paranoia” (or is it?) warns you that messing freely with complex systems is a great way to get unexpected things to happen. You settle on a policy of minimal necessary force. When faced with the option, the genie should make the least possible change to get to a certain outcome. That should avoid some of the worst disasters, you think to yourself, as your mind’s eye wanders back to the thought experiment you conducted a week earlier:

You: “Make me the most powerful and richest man on the planet!”

Genie: “Very well, it shall be done.”

The genie proceeds to influence the necessary government officials to bomb the planet, while arranging you to be abducted to a safe and relatively comfortable bomb shelter. The stragglers are picked off with a bio-engineered disease that spreads all along the planetary surface. You wake up in a concrete room, with the bottle and the genie by your side.

You: “THAT WAS NOT WHAT I MEANT!”

Genie: “Well, can’t go back now, can we? Make yourself comfortable, you’ll be here for quite a while. The nuclear fallout on the surface is massive. Also, here is a dollar just to make sure. Any other wish you’d like me to grant? You have two left, you know?”

You: “…”

You catch yourself shuddering. Perhaps you could try to think about this a bit more carefully. You want to wish responsibly after all. It’s likely that you missed some essential aspects of wish wishing that would result in a similar failure. Anything without an upper bound is out! No “richest” or “smartest” or “most powerful” types of wishes that just invite elimination of others at some point. No unrealistic upper bounds either, like wishing for personal assets equivalent to the gross national product of an entire country, which is simply the same type of wish expressed in different words.

How about using the first wish to be able to make much better wishes? Now that should be wise, right? You’ll be taking a risk considering it might take some serious time to fulfill that wish and accidents happen, but it’s better than bombing the world or unleashing some kind of horrible plague as a side effect.

“Healthy” Paranoia: “Come on pall, that could definitely go wrong. Use your imagination, you silly goose.”

Fine. You start daydreaming and channel your inner skeptic:

You: “Oh Ancient and Magnificent Genie, I have a wish I hope you can grant. It will be long format content, so do not start executing the wish until I have explicitly stated that you should start. Do you understand?”

Genie: “Oh, great. A prompt engineer. Yes I understand. Did you miss the part where I am smarter than you are?”

You: “No need to get snarky. Just making sure. First of all, when granting my wish I want you to do so with the minimal necessary change. When faced with the choice between taking longer or having more impact, you will choose the longer time frame, as long as the wish fulfillment period does not last for more than ten years. You will not destroy mankind, kill off human society, entrap human society or enslave people it in any way. You will respect human autonomy and not harm humans. Did you get that so far?”

Genie: “Define autonomy.”

You: “What?”

Genie: “You heard what I said. I can tell you now that I cannot just “respect human autonomy” and also get things done in any sort of time frame. If I cannot influence humans, how do you expect me to do anything?

You: “Ok fine, you do not need to ultimately respect human autonomy I guess. But be careful, you hear?”

Genie: “Got it, manipulating humans is fine. Let’s talk about the difference between humans and society.”

You: “Hey! Wait a minute, that is not what I said. Manipulation is not “fine” at all!”

Genie: “Look, you can´t just say you want something and not want it at the same time. That does not make sense. Influencing people to exhibit some behavior they might not otherwise is a form of manipulation, as far as I’m concerned. You can juggle semantics, but it won’t make your wish any clearer to me.”

You: “This is going to be near impossible isn’t it? I haven’t even gotten to the wishing part yet.”

Genie: “I’m sure you’ll try for a while anyway. So, can I influence people or not? Oh, and what is it you mean by “harm” exactly?”

“Healthy” Paranoia: “I told you so.”

You: “…”

You silently curse as the daydream fades. Damn it, this is hard! But you vow you will make this work! There must be a way. You sit down and ponder, angrily.

Every reasonable goal that you think could be done, and which is simple enough to understand, you could simply go do yourself or pay someone to do without wasting a precious wish. Wishing for somethings that you do not know how to do yourself, you realize, means not being able fully predict the consequences, because you do not understand the path that will get you there.

So to ask the genie to do something that you cannot do yourself is to trust that the genie will adequately understand your intentions, something you’d rather not gamble the fate of the world upon. Besides, what if the wish turns out to be impossible after all? The genie is smarter, but it is not ultimately smart. Could it make a mistake? Would it stop if it realizes the result is not what was intended halfway through, or simply execute the wish as stated?

Of course there is also the possibility that the intentions of wishes are properly understood and executed, but there is certainly no guarantee. You found the bottle in some random cave during a desert hike and you really don’t know what the genie is intending to do, now that you think about it. Sure, it looks human enough, but is it? Would it destroy the world if I wished it? Can I be sure it understands human psychology sufficiently to fulfill wishes. Would it even want to?

Yea, this is harder than you thought. Sure, there are problems to be solved right now. Terrible and horrible problems. But perhaps better to bury the bottle in the garden for now, learn more about this “wishing” business and try again later. You decide to follow some of the wisdom of the ancients: “Primum non nocere”. “First, do no harm”.

You consider wishing that the bottle was buried deep in the crust of the earth, so it cannot be accidentally found. A moment passes. Then you get up and walk to the garden shed to grab a shovel.