Earlier, you wrote
Personally I don't want to contribute anything to an organisation which admits to explore strategies that are unacceptable by most people. And I wouldn't suggest anyone else to do so.
Surely building an anti-natalist AI that turns the universe into inert matter would be considered unacceptable by most people. So I'm confused. Do you intend to denounce SIAI if they do seriously consider this strategy, and also if they don't?
Surely building an anti-natalist AI that turns the universe into inert matter would be considered unacceptable by most people. So I'm confused.
Yet I am not secretive about it and I believe that it is one of the less horrible strategies. Given that SI is strongly attached to decision theoretic ideas, which I believe are not the default outcome due to practically intractable problems, I fear that their strategies might turn out to be much worse than the default case.
I think that it is naive to simply trust SI because they seem like nice people. Although I...
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.