Do you think SingInst is too attached to a specific kind of FAI design?
XiXiDu seems to think so. I guess I'm less certain but I didn't want to question that particular premise in my response to him.
It does confuse me that Eliezer set his focus so early on CEV. I think "it's too early to decide this" applies to CEV just as well as XiXiDu's anti-natalist AI. Why not explore and keep all the plausible options open until the many strategically important questions become clearer? Why did it fall to someone outside SIAI (me, in particular) to write about the normative and meta-philosophical approaches to FAI? (Note that the former covers XiXiDu's idea as a special case.) Also concerning is that many criticisms have been directed at CEV but Eliezer seems to ignore most of them.
Also, at this point, it might be useful to unpack "SingInst" into particular people constituting it.
I'd be surprised if there weren't people within SingInst who disagree with the focus on CEV, but if so, they seem reluctant to disagree in public so it's hard to tell who exactly, or how much say they have in what SingInst actually does.
I guess this could all be due to PR considerations. Maybe Eliezer just wanted to focus public attention on CEV because it's the politically least objectionable FAI approach, and isn't really terribly attached to the idea when it comes to actually building an FAI. But you can see how an outsider might get that impression...
I always thought CEV was half-baked as a technical solution, but as a PR tactic it is...genius.
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.