However, the notion that "avoid strength, attack weakness" is primarily a movie-plot-ism seems dubious to me.
That certainly would be dubious. Avoid strength, attack weakness is right behind 'be a whole heap stronger' as far as obvious universal strategies go.
Humans will perform software experiments trying to harness badly-understood technologies (ecosystems of self-modifying software agents, say). There will be some (epsilon) danger of paperclipping in this process. Humans will take precautions (lots of people have ideas for precautions that we could take). It is rational for them to take precautions, AND the precautions do not completely eliminate the chance of paperclipping, AND it is rational for them to forge ahead with the experiments despite the danger. During these experiments, people will gradually learn how the badly-understood technologies work, and transform them into much safer (and often much more effective) technologies.
If there are ways to make it possible to experiment and make small mistakes and minimise the risk of catastrophe then I am all in favour of using them. Working out which experiments are good ones to do so that people can learn from them and which ones will make everything dead is a non-trivial task that I'm quite glad to leave to someone else. Given that I suspect both caution and courage to lead to an unfortunately high probability of extinction I don't envy them the responsibility.
AND it is rational for them to forge ahead with the experiments despite the danger.
Possibly. You can't make that conclusion without knowing the epsilon in question and the alternatives to such experimentation. But there are times when it is rational to go ahead despite the danger.
The fate of most species is extinction. As the first intelligent agents, people can't seriously expect our species to last for very long. Now that we have unleashed user-modifiable genetic materials on the planet, DNA's days are surely numbered. Surely that's a good thing. Today's primitive and backwards biotechnology is a useless tangle of unmaintainable spaghetti code that leaves a trail of slime wherever it goes - who would want to preserve that?
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.