When Holden wrote his criticism of SIAI he also made the point that SIAI is overly optimistic when it comes to creating a FAI.
Holden: I believe that the probability of an unfavorable outcome - by which I mean an outcome essentially equivalent to what a UFAI would bring about - exceeds 90% in such a scenario. I believe the goal of designing a "Friendly" utility function is likely to be beyond the abilities even of the best team of humans willing to design such a function.
SIAI considers the problem of creating FAI solvable. That view can be described as believing that there's good in the machine. If only we program them right, then they will be good.
Those journalists think that belief is naive.
The description isn't nice but I have seen worse in my own contact with the German media while promoting Quantified Self in German press.
The following is a clipping of a documentary about transhumanism that I recorded when it aired on Arte, September 22 2011.
At the beginning and end of the video Luke Muehlhauser and Michael Anissimov give a short commentary.
Download here: German, French (ask for HD download link). Should play with VLC player.
Sadly, the people who produced the show seemed to be somewhat confused about the agenda of the Singularity Institute. At one point they seem to be saying that the SIAI believes into "the good in the machines", adding "how naive!", while the next sentence talks about how the SIAI tries to figure out how to make machines respect humans.
Here is the original part of the clip that I am talking about:
My translation:
I am a native German speaker by the way, maybe someone else who speaks German can make more sense of it (and is willing to translate the whole clip).