I also find it rather unsurprising that the comment in question has been as far down-voted as it has been,
Most of us frown on irresponsible encouragements to criminal acts.
Most of us frown on irresponsible encouragements to criminal acts.
As well you should. Of course, this carries a number of interesting assumptions:
The assumption of irresponsibility.
The assumption of encouragement.
The assumption of the 'wrongness' of criminal acts.
Let me rephrase this: If you believed -- very strongly (say confidence over 90%) -- there was a strong chance that a specific person was going to destroy the world, and you also knew that only you were willing to acknowledge the material evidence which lead you to this conclusion...
Wou...
Here's a poser that occurred to us over the summer, and one that we couldn't really come up with any satisfactory solution to. The people who work at the Singularity Institute have a high estimate of the probability that an Unfriendly AI will destroy the world. People who work for http://nuclearrisk.org/ have a very high estimate of the probability that a nuclear war will destroy the world (by their estimates, if you are American and under 40, then nuclear war is the single most likely way in which you might die next year).
It seems like there are good reasons to take these numbers seriously, because Eliezer is probably the world expert on AI risk, and Hellman is probably the world expert on nuclear risk. However, there's a problem - Eliezer is an expert on AI risk because he believes that AI risk is a bigger risk than nuclear war. Similarly, Hellman chose to study nuclear risks and not AI risk I because he had a higher than average estimate of the threat of nuclear war.
It seems like it might be a good idea to know what the probability of each of these risks is. Is there a sensible way for these people to correct for the fact that the people studying these risks are those that have high estimate of them in the first place?