A FAI that includes such "Should I run?" heuristic could pose a lesser risk than a FAI without such heuristic. If this heuristic works better than human judgment about running a FAI, it should be used instead of human judgment.
This is the same principle as for AI's decisions themselves, where we don't ask AI's designers for object-level moral judgments, or encode specific object-level moral judgments into AI. Not running an AI would then be equivalent to hardcoding the decision "Should the AI run?" resolved by designers to "No." into the AI, instead of coding the question and letting the AI itself answer it (assuming we can expect it to answer the question more reliably than the programmers can).
If we botched the FAI, wouldn't we also probably have botched its ability to decide whether it should run?
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.