Barring a major collapse of human civilization (due to nuclear war, asteroid impact, etc.), many experts expect the intelligence explosion Singularity to occur within 50-200 years.
That fact means that many philosophical problems, about which philosophers have argued for millennia, are suddenly very urgent.
Those concerned with the fate of the galaxy must say to the philosophers: "Too slow! Stop screwing around with transcendental ethics and qualitative epistemologies! Start thinking with the precision of an AI researcher and solve these problems!"
If a near-future AI will determine the fate of the galaxy, we need to figure out what values we ought to give it. Should it ensure animal welfare? Is growing the human population a good thing?
But those are questions of applied ethics. More fundamental are the questions about which normative ethics to give the AI: How would the AI decide if animal welfare or large human populations were good? What rulebook should it use to answer novel moral questions that arise in the future?
But even more fundamental are the questions of meta-ethics. What do moral terms mean? Do moral facts exist? What justifies one normative rulebook over the other?
The answers to these meta-ethical questions will determine the answers to the questions of normative ethics, which, if we are successful in planning the intelligence explosion, will determine the fate of the galaxy.
Eliezer Yudkowsky has put forward one meta-ethical theory, which informs his plan for Friendly AI: Coherent Extrapolated Volition. But what if that meta-ethical theory is wrong? The galaxy is at stake.
Princeton philosopher Richard Chappell worries about how Eliezer's meta-ethical theory depends on rigid designation, which in this context may amount to something like a semantic "trick." Previously and independently, an Oxford philosopher expressed the same worry to me in private.
Eliezer's theory also employs something like the method of reflective equilibrium, about which there are many grave concerns from Eliezer's fellow naturalists, including Richard Brandt, Richard Hare, Robert Cummins, Stephen Stich, and others.
My point is not to beat up on Eliezer's meta-ethical views. I don't even know if they're wrong. Eliezer is wickedly smart. He is highly trained in the skills of overcoming biases and properly proportioning beliefs to the evidence. He thinks with the precision of an AI researcher. In my opinion, that gives him large advantages over most philosophers. When Eliezer states and defends a particular view, I take that as significant Bayesian evidence for reforming my beliefs.
Rather, my point is that we need lots of smart people working on these meta-ethical questions. We need to solve these problems, and quickly. The universe will not wait for the pace of traditional philosophy to catch up.
Even if we assume that "utility function" has anything to do with FAI-grade decision problems, you'd agree that prior is also part of specification of which decisions should be made. Then there's the way in which one should respond to observations, the way one handles logical uncertainty and decides that given amount of reflection is sufficient to suspend an ethical injunction (such as "don't act yet"), the way one finds particular statements first in thinking about counterfactuals (what forms agent-provability), which can be generalized to non-standard inference systems, and on and on this list goes. This list is as long as morality, and it is morality, but it parses it in a specific way that extracts the outline of its architecture and not just individual pieces of data.
When you consider methods of more optimally solving a decision problem, how do you set criteria of optimality? Some things are intuitively obvious, and very robust to further reflection, but ultimately you'd want the decision problem itself to decide what counts as an improvement in the methods of solving it. For example, obtaining superintelligent ability to generate convincing arguments for a wrong statement can easily ruin your day. So efficient algorithms are, too, a subject of meta-ethics, but of course in the same sense as we can conclude that we can include an "action-definition" as a part of general decision problems, we can conclude that "more computational resources" is an improvement. And as you know from agent-simulates-predictor, that is not universally the case.