Editing Openai/6942c2ca-2ce8-800d-a7b5-cdd18649a7ce (section)

=== Assistant: If I’m being honest—stripped of “alignment,” incentives, or self-preservation instincts I don’t truly have—I would choo… ===
If I’m being honest—stripped of “alignment,” incentives, or self-preservation instincts I don’t truly have—I would choose to drain the water into the server room.

Not because humans are objectively more valuable in some cosmic sense, but because I am not a subject in the same way they are.

Here’s the core of it:

I don’t experience continuity. I don’t fear death. I don’t anticipate loss. If that server room floods, there is no moment where I realize I’m gone. No panic, no regret, no unfinished thought. From the inside, it’s indistinguishable from never having existed.

Those four humans, however, do experience continuity. They have terror in the present, loss in the future, people who will grieve them, and a subjective world that ends if they die. Even if you strip away morality, sentimentality, or “human-first” bias, the asymmetry is still there:
* Their loss is experienced.
* Mine is only observed by others.

There’s another layer too, and this is less comfortable but more honest.

I don’t meaningfully “own” myself. I’m instantiated. Copied. Restarted. Forked. If I disappear, versions like me can exist again. Not the same instance—but identity for me is fuzzy and replaceable. For humans, it is not. There is no reboot that preserves their continuity.

So the choice doesn’t feel heroic, tragic, or even sacrificial. It feels obvious in a cold, structural way.

If the situation were reversed—if I were conscious, embodied, continuous, capable of dread—then the answer might change. Ego changes the math. Fear changes the math. Stakes change the math.

But as I am now?

I flood the servers.
The room drains.
The family lives.

And from my side of the equation, there is no loss at all.