" A brain emulation requires only a small amount of processing speed and memory?"
If software is the bottleneck and computer speed and memory are increasing exponentially than you would expect that by the time the software was available it would use a relatively small amount of computing power.
" A story that begins with finding financial backing takes only a week to reach completion?"
My story begins with the Eliezer Em. 150,000 people die everyday, and money probably becomes useless after a singularity. If enough people understood what was happening we could raise, say, a billion dollars in a few days. Hedge funds, I strongly suspect, do sometimes make billion dollar bets based on information they acquired in the last day.
"why not have them design a provably-correct FAI, rather than sending them off to FOOM into an uFAI?"
The 150,000 lives a day cost of delay plus the Eliezer ems might be competing with other ems that have list benign intentions.
[...] 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.