Just that, according to their belief system
It seems to you that according to their belief system.
they should sponsor false-flag cells who would (perhaps without knowing the master they truly serve).
Given how obvious the motivation is, and the high frequency with which people independently conclude that SIAI should kill AI researchers, think about the consequences of anyone doing this for anyone actively worried about UFAI.
If you really believed that unFriendly AI was going to dissolve the whole of humanity into smileys/jelly/paperclips, then whacking a few reckless computer geeks would be a small price to pay, ethical injunctions or no ethical injunctions.
Ethical injunctions are not separate values to be traded off against saving the world; they're policies you follow because it appears, all things considered, that following them has highest expected utility, even if in a single case you fallibly perceive that violating them would be good.
(If you didn't read the posts linked from that wiki page, you should.)
You're right that the motivation would be obvious today (to a certain tiny subset of geeky people). But what if there had been a decade of rising anti-AI feeling amongst the general population before the assassinations? Marches, direct actions, carried out with animal-rights style fervour? I'm sure that could all be stirred up with the right fanfiction ("Harry Potter And The Monster In The Chinese Room").
I understand what ethical injunctions are - but would SIAI be bound by them given their apparent "torture someone to avoid trillions of people having to blink" hyper-utilitarianism?
Here's why I'm not going to give money to the SIAI any time soon.
Let's suppose that Friendly AI is possible. In other words, it's possible that a small subset of humans can make a superhuman AI which uses something like Coherent Extrapolated Volition to increase the happiness of humans in general (without resorting to skeevy hacks like releasing an orgasm virus).
Now, the extrapolated volition of all humans is probably a tricky thing to determine. I don't want to get sidetracked into writing about my relationship history, but sometimes I feel like it's hard to extrapolate the volition of one human.
If it's possible to make a Friendly superhuman AI that optimises CEV, then it's surely way easier to make an unFriendly superhuman AI that optimises a much simpler variable, like the share price of IBM.
Long before a Friendly AI is developed, some research team is going to be in a position to deploy an unFriendly AI that tries to maximise the personal wealth of the researchers, or the share price of the corporation that employs them, or pursues some other goal that the rest of humanity might not like.
And who's going to stop that happening? If the executives of Corporation X are in a position to unleash an AI with a monomaniacal dedication to maximising the Corp's shareholder value, it's probably illegal for them not to do just that.
If you genuinely believe that superhuman AI is possible, it seems to me that, as well as sponsoring efforts to design Friendly AI, you need to (a) lobby against AI research by any groups who aren't 100% committed to Friendly AI (pay off reactionary politicians so AI regulation becomes a campaign issue, etc.) (b) assassinate any researchers who look like they're on track to deploying an unFriendly AI, then destroy their labs and backups.
But SIAI seems to be fixated on design at the expense of the other, equally important priorities. I'm not saying I expect SIAI to pursue illegal goals openly, but there is such a thing as a false-flag operation.
While Michelle Bachmann isn't talking about how AI research is a threat to the US constitution, and Ben Goertzel remains free and alive, I can't take the SIAI seriously.