He believes that the SIAI tends to be overly dramatic about Hard Takeoff scenarios at the expense of more important ethical problems...
What are the more important ethical problems?
Well... That is hard to communicate now, as I will need to extricate the problems from the specifics that were communicated to me (in confidence)...
Let's see...
1) That there is a dangerous political movement in the USA that seems to be preferring revealed knowledge to scientific understanding and investigation. 2) Poverty 3) Education 4) Hunger (I myself suffer from this problem - I am disabled, on a fixed income, and while I am in school again and doing quite well I still have to make choices sometimes between necessities... And, I am quite well off compa...
[...] 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.