Devote the second half to discussing the question of FAI, with references to e.g. Joshua Greene's thesis and other relevant sources for establishing this argument.
(Now that this is struck out it might not matter, but) I wonder if, in addition to possibly overrating Greene's significance as an exponent of moral irrealism, we don't overrate the significance of moral realism as an obstacle to understanding FAI ("shiny pitchforks"). I would expect the academic target audience of this paper, especially the more technical subset, to be metaethically confused but not moral realists. Much more tentatively, I suspect that for the technical audience, more important than resolving metaethical confusion would be communicating the complexity of values: getting across "no, you really don't just value intelligence or knowledge or 'complexity', you really don't want humans replaced by arbitrary greater intelligences (or possibly replaced by anything; values can be path-dependent), and, while that would be true even if most superintelligences had complex values and built complex worlds, there's reason to think most would produce dull monocultures." ("Which Consequentialism? Machine Ethics and Moral Divergence" is closely related.)
But maybe I overstate the difference between that and metaethical confusion; both fall under "reasons to think we get a good outcome by default", both are supported by intuitions against "arbitrary" values, and probably have other psychology in common.
Robin criticizes Eliezer for not having written up his arguments about the Singularity in a standard style and submitted them for publication. Others, too, make the same complaint: the arguments involved are covered over such a huge mountain of posts that it's impossible for most outsiders to seriously evaluate them. This is a problem for both those who'd want to critique the concept, and for those who tentatively agree and would want to learn more about it.
Since it appears (do correct me if I'm wrong!) that Eliezer doesn't currently consider it worth the time and effort to do this, why not enlist the LW community in summarizing his arguments the best we can and submit them somewhere once we're done? Minds and Machines will be having a special issue on transhumanism, cognitive enhancement and AI, with a deadline for submission in January; that seems like a good opportunity for the paper. Their call for papers is asking for submissions that are around 4000 to 12 000 words.
The paper should probably
Devote the second half to discussing the question of FAI, with references to e.g. Joshua Greene's thesis and other relevant sources for establishing this argument.Carl Shulman says SIAI is already working on a separate paper on this, so it'd be better for us to concentrate merely on the FOOM aspect.I have created a wiki page for the draft version of the paper. Anyone's free to edit.