Here are a few premises:
If you believe that self-improving AI is inevitable and that creating friendly AI is more difficult than creating unfriendly AI then to launch an AI that simply destroys everything as quickly as possible has a higher expected utility than doing nothing or trying to implement an AI that is not completely friendly.
The negative utility of an AI that transforms the universe into an inanimate state is simply the positive utility of a perfectly friendly AI. But most outcomes are expected to yield unfriendly AI, or not quite friendly AI, which will actively increase negative utility by possibly keeping alive living beings indefinitely given abhorrent circumstances. To prevent those scenarios one can try to solve friendly AI, which will most likely fail (or even increase the chances of a negative singularity), or try to launch a destructive singleton with simple goals to prevent further suffering and the evolution of life elsewhere in the universe. Creating a destructive self-improving AI that kills all life should be the easiest of all possibilities with a high probability of success.
Suppose you buy the argument that humanity faces both the risk of AI-caused extinction and the opportunity to shape an AI-built utopia. What should we do about that? As Wei Dai asks, "In what direction should we nudge the future, to maximize the chances and impact of a positive intelligence explosion?"
This post serves as a table of contents and an introduction for an ongoing strategic analysis of AI risk and opportunity.
Contents:
Why discuss AI safety strategy?
The main reason to discuss AI safety strategy is, of course, to draw on a wide spectrum of human expertise and processing power to clarify our understanding of the factors at play and the expected value of particular interventions we could invest in: raising awareness of safety concerns, forming a Friendly AI team, differential technological development, investigating AGI confinement methods, and others.
Discussing AI safety strategy is also a challenging exercise in applied rationality. The relevant issues are complex and uncertain, but we need to take advantage of the fact that rationality is faster than science: we can't "try" a bunch of intelligence explosions and see which one works best. We'll have to predict in advance how the future will develop and what we can do about it.
Core readings
Before engaging with this series, I recommend you read at least the following articles:
Example questions
Which strategic questions would we like to answer? Muehlhauser (2011) elaborates on the following questions:
Salamon & Muehlhauser (2013) list several other questions gathered from the participants of a workshop following Singularity Summit 2011, including:
These are the kinds of questions we will be tackling in this series of posts for Less Wrong Discussion, in order to improve our predictions about which direction we can nudge the future to maximize the chances of a positive intelligence explosion.