Assuming your argument is correct, wouldn't it make more sense to blow ourselves up with nukes rather than pollute the universe with UFAI? There may be other intelligent civilizations out there leading worthwhile lives that we threaten unfairly by unleashing UFAI.
There might be countless planets that are about to undergo an evolutionary arms race for the next few billions years resulting in a lot of suffering. It is very unlikely that there is a single source of life that is exactly on the right stage of evolution with exactly the right mind design to not only lead worthwhile lives but also get their AI technology exactly right to not turn everything into a living hell.
In case you assign negative utility to suffering, which is likely to be universally accepted to have negative utility, then given that you are an expected utility maximizer it should be a serious consideration to end all life. Because 1) agents that are an effect of evolution have complex values 2) to satisfy complex values you need to meet complex circumstances 3) complex systems can fail in complex ways 4) any attempt at friendly AI, which is incredible complex, is likely to fail in unforeseeable ways.
For instance, say I were invincible. I could theoretically stab everyone I meet without any consequences, but I doubt I would do that. And I'm just human.
To name just one example where things could go horrible wrong. Humans are by their very nature interested in domination and sex. Our aversion against sexual exploitation is largely dependent on the memeplex of our cultural and societal circumstances. If you knew more, were smarter and could think faster you might very well realize that such an aversion is a unnecessary remnant that you can easily extinguish to open up new pathways to gain utility. That Gandhi would not agree to have his brain modified into a baby-eater is incredible naive. Given the technology people will alter their preferences and personality. Many people actually perceive their moral reservations to be limiting. It only takes some amount of insight to just overcome such limitations.
You simply can't be sure that future won't hold vast amounts of negative utility. It is much easier for things to go horrible wrong than to be barely acceptable.
Goodness may seem mystical and amazingly complex from our current viewpoint, but is it really as complex as all that?
Maybe not, but betting on the possibility that goodness can be easily achieved is like pulling a random AI from mind design space hoping that it turns out to be friendly.
You simply can't be sure that future won't hold vast amounts of negative utility. It is much easier for things to go horrible wrong than to be barely acceptable.
Similarly, it is easier to make piles of rubble than skyscrapers. Yet - amazingly - there are plenty of skyscrapers out there. Obviously something funny is going on...
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.