Sure, but the idea that we should ignore futures where we are dead will still have some bizarre implications. For example, it would strongly contradict Nick Bostrom's MaxiPOK principle (maximize the probability of an OK outcome). In particular, if you thought that the development of AGI would lead to utopia with probability p u, near instant human extinction with probability p e and torture of humans with probability p _ t, where
p t << p u
then one would have a strong motive to accelerate the development of AGI as much as possible, because the total probability of mediocre outcomes due to non-extinction global catastrophes like resource depletion or nuclear war increases every year that AGI doesn't get developed. Your actions would be dominated by trying to increase the strength of the inequality p t << p u whilst getting the job done quickly enough that p u was still bigger than the probability of ordinary global problems such as global warming happening in your development window. You would do this even at the expense of increasing the probability p e - potentially until it was > 0.5. You'd better be damn sure that anthropic reasoning is correct if you're going to do this!
In the early 1980s Douglas Lenat wrote EURISKO, a program Eliezer called "[maybe] the most sophisticated self-improving AI ever built". The program reportedly had some high-profile successes in various domains, like becoming world champion at a certain wargame or designing good integrated circuits.
Despite requests Lenat never released the source code. You can download an introductory paper: "Why AM and EURISKO appear to work" [PDF]. Honestly, reading it leaves a programmer still mystified about the internal workings of the AI: for example, what does the main loop look like? Researchers supposedly answered such questions in a more detailed publication, "EURISKO: A program that learns new heuristics and domain concepts." Artificial Intelligence (21): pp. 61-98. I couldn't find that paper available for download anywhere, and being in Russia I found it quite tricky to get a paper version. Maybe you Americans will have better luck with your local library? And to the best of my knowledge no one ever succeeded in (or even seriously tried) confirming Lenat's EURISKO results.
Today in 2009 this state of affairs looks laughable. A 30-year-old pivotal breakthrough in a large and important field... that never even got reproduced. What if it was a gigantic case of Clever Hans? How do you know? You're supposed to be a scientist, little one.
So my proposal to the LessWrong community: let's reimplement EURISKO!
We have some competent programmers here, don't we? We have open source tools and languages that weren't around in 1980. We can build an open source implementation available for all to play. In my book this counts as solid progress in the AI field.
Hell, I'd do it on my own if I had the goddamn paper.
Update: RichardKennaway has put Lenat's detailed papers up online, see the comments.