What I really believe is that there is not enough data to come to any definitive conclusion about the whole idea of a technological singularity and dangerous recursive self-improvement in particular and that it would be stupid to act on any conclusion that one could possible come up with at this point.
I agree with the "not enough data to come to any definitive conclusion" part, but think we could prepare for the Singularity by building an organization that is not attached to any particular plan but is ready to act when there is enough data to come to definitive conclusions (and tries to gather more data in the mean time). Do you agree with this, or do you think we should literally do nothing?
I believe that SI/lesswrong mainly produces science fiction and interesting, although practically completely useless, though-experiments.
I guess I have a higher opinion of SIAI than that. Just a few months ago you were saying:
I also fear that, at some point, I might need the money. Otherwise I would have already donated a lot more to the Singularity Institute years ago.
What made you change your mind since then?
I also fear that, at some point, I might need the money. Otherwise I would have already donated a lot more to the Singularity Institute years ago.
What made you change your mind since then?
Before you throw more of what I wrote in the past at me:
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.