To the extent that they can be considered to be in good faith (and not just verbal tokens intended to influence) some of them only support the position you used them for if you genuinely do not understand them (implying that there is no answer).
I'm probably too tired to parse this right now. I believe there probably is an answer, but it is buried under hundreds of posts about marginal issues. All those writings on rationality, there is nothing I disagree with. Many people know about all this even outside of the LW community. But what is it that they don't know that EY and the SIAI knows? What I was trying to say is that if I have come across it then it was not convincing enough to take it as serious as some people here obviously do.
It looks like that I'm not alone. Goertzel, Hanson, Egan and lots of other people don't see it as well. So what are we missing, what is it that we haven't read or understood?
Goertzel: I could and will list the errors I see in his arguments (if nobody there has done so first). For now I'll just say his response to claim #2 seems to conflate humans and AIs. But unless I've missed something big, which certainly seems possible, he didn't make his decision based on those arguments. They don't seem good enough on their face to convince anyone. For example, I don't think he could really believe that he and other researchers would unconsciously restrict the AI's movement in the space of possible minds to the safe area(s), but if we re...
[...] 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.