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:
The above is just some quick and dirty introspection that might hint at the reason for some seemingly contradictionary statements. The real reasons are much more complex of course, but I haven't thought about that either :-)
I just don't have the time right now to think hard about all the issues discussed here. I am still busy improving my education. At some point I will try to tackle the issues with due respect and in all seriousness.
Before you throw more of what I wrote in the past at me:
I have quoted everything XiXiDu said here so that it is not lost in any future edits.
Many of XiXis contributions consist of persuasive denunciations. As he points out in the parent (and quoted below), often these are based off little research, without much contemplation and are done to provoke reactions rather than because they are correct. Since XiXiDu is rather experienced at this mode of communication - and the arguments he uses have been able to be selected for persuasiveness through trial and ...
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.