it is safe to assert his pacifism is a product of his general intelligence
No, that's not at all obvious. Let me give you two alternatives:
It might be that pacifism is not highly correlated with either intelligence or scientific ability. For every Einstein, you can find some equally intelligent but bellicose scientist. Von Neumann, perhaps. Or Edward Teller.
It might also be that pacifism is correlated with the personality traits that push people into science, and that people of high intelligence but a more aggressive temperament choose alternate career paths. Perhaps finance, or politics, or military service.
One example of an intelligent pacifist isn't evidence of correlation, much less of causation.
So asr, would you say violence is generally stupid or intelligent?
People often equate mindlessness with violence thus the phrase mindless violence is reasonably common but I have never encountered the phrase intelligent violence, is intelligent violence an oxymoron? Surely intelligent people can resolve conflict via non-violent methods?
Here are a couple of news reports mentioning mindless violence:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-17062738
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/sport/4149765/Brainless-brawlers-cost-schools.html
It would be intereste...
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.