I really liked this comment by FrankAdamek:
With regards to teaching an AI to care: what you can teach a mind depends on the mind. The best examples come from human beings: for hundreds of years many (though not all) parents have taught their children that it is wrong to have sex before marriage, a precept that many people break even when they think they shouldn't and feel bad about it . And that's with our built in desires for social acceptance and hardware for propositional morality. For another example, you can't train tigers to care about their handlers. No matter how much time you spend with them and care for them, they sometimes bite off arms just because they are hungry. I understand most big cats are like this.
It's quite true that nobody plans to build a system with no concern for human life, but it's also true that many people assume Friendliness is easy.
[...] SIAI's Scary Idea goes way beyond the mere statement that there are risks as well as benefits associated with advanced AGI, and that AGI is a potential existential risk.
[...] Although an intense interest in rationalism is one of the hallmarks of the SIAI community, still I have not yet seen a clear logical argument for the Scary Idea laid out anywhere. (If I'm wrong, please send me the link, and I'll revise this post accordingly. Be aware that I've already at least skimmed everything Eliezer Yudkowsky has written on related topics.)
So if one wants a clear argument for the Scary Idea, one basically has to construct it oneself.
[...] If you put the above points all together, you come up with a heuristic argument for the Scary Idea. Roughly, the argument goes something like: If someone builds an advanced AGI without a provably Friendly architecture, probably it will have a hard takeoff, and then probably this will lead to a superhuman AGI system with an architecture drawn from the vast majority of mind-architectures that are not sufficiently harmonious with the complex, fragile human value system to make humans happy and keep humans around.
The line of argument makes sense, if you accept the premises.
But, I don't.
Ben Goertzel: The Singularity Institute's Scary Idea (and Why I Don't Buy It), October 29 2010. Thanks to XiXiDu for the pointer.