The tiebreaker consideration deemed most important was timelines. Pushing on WBE-related tech would, if anything, cause machine superintelligence to be created sooner. All else being equal, sooner timelines would seem to decrease the probability of a win scenario. Thus, despite many shortcomings in the design of this expert elicitation, the group’s current collective best guess, given the considerations evaluated so far, is that humanity should not accelerate WBE-related tech.
If this argument is correct, doesn't it also imply that humanity should not accelerate de novo AI-related tech? Did the workshop notice that, or am I misunderstanding something?
(BTW, when I tried to copy a section from the PDF to quote it, some of the characters (for example, "Th" in the first word of the quoted paragraph) couldn't be copied correctly. Whoever is doing the PDF production, can you please check if there is some option you can set to correct this?)
I assume the th couldn't be copied because it's a ligature, which makes the publication look better.
doesn't it also imply that humanity should not accelerate de novo AI-related tech
Correct. This is a key piece of recommended differential technological progress, and this recommendation is stated explicitly in both "AI as a negative and positive factor in global risk" and in "Intelligence Explosion: Evidence and Import."
Here is a short new publication from the Singularity Institute, on the 2-day workshop that followed Singularity Summit 2011.
Note the new publication design. We are currently porting our earlier publications to this template, too.