I have quoted everything XiXiDu said here so that it is not lost in any future edits.
You might want to save this as well.
...without much contemplation and are done to provoke reactions rather than because they are correct.
Here is how I see it. I am just an uneducated below average IQ individual and don't spend more time on my submissions than it takes to write them. If people are swayed by my ramblings then how firm could their beliefs possible be in the first place?
Many of XiXis contributions consist of persuasive denunciations. [...] there is a risk that he will be taken more seriously than is warranted.
I could have as easily argued in favor of SI. If I was to start now and put some extra effort into it I believe I could actually become more persuasiveness than SI itself. Do you believe that in a world where I did that you would tell people that my arguments are based on little research and that there is a risk that I am taken more seriously than is warranted?
uneducated below average IQ
Don't be ridiculous.
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.