It's not just extreme cases like saving children without authorization-- have you ever heard someone (possibly a parent) saying that constant supervision is more work than doing the task themselves?
I was going to say that if you can't trust subordinates, you might as well not have them, but that's an exaggeration-- tools can be very useful. It's fine that a crane doesn't have the capacity for independent action, it's still very useful for lifting heavy objects. [1]
In some ways, you get more safety by doing IA (intelligence augmentation), but while people are probably Friendly (unlikely to destroy the human race), they're not reliably friendly.
[1] For all I know, these days the taller cranes have an active ability to rebalance themselves. If so, that's still very limited unsupervised action.
It's not just extreme cases like saving children without authorization-- have you ever heard someone (possibly a parent) saying that constant supervision is more work than doing the task themselves?
That's only true if you (the supervisor) know how to perform the task yourself. However, there are a great many tasks that we don't know how to do, but could evaluate the result if the AI did them for us. We could ask it to prove P!=NP, to write provably correct programs, to design machines and materials and medications that we could test in the normal way that we test such things, etc.
[...] 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.