So asr, would you say violence is generally stupid or intelligent?
We have gone to a great deal of trouble, in modern society, to make violence a bad option, so today in our society often violence is committed by the impulsive, mentally ill, or short-sighted. But that's not an inevitable property of violence and hasn't always been true. You would have gotten a different answer before the 20th century. I don't know what answer you'll get in the 22nd century.
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?
The word we usually use for intelligent violence is "ruthless" or "cunning" -- and many people are described that way. Stalin, for instance, was apparently capable of long hours of hard work, had an excellent attention to detail, and otherwise appears to have been a smart guy. Just also willing to have millions of people murdered.
Does the army prohibit intelligent people from joining?
No. Many smart capable people go to West Point or Annapolis. A high fraction of successful American engineers in the 19th century were West Point alums.
You keep jumping from correlation to causation, in a domain when there are obvious alternate effects going on. I don't know if there is a correlation, but even if there were, it wouldn't be very strong evidence. Being a good scientist requires both intelligence and the right kind of personality. You are asserting that any correlation is solely due to the intelligence part of the equation. This strikes me as a very problematic assumption. Very few scientists are also successful lawyers. It does not follow that lawyers are stupid.
I am not presenting a scientific thesis. This is only a debate, and a reasonably informal one? I am thinking openly. I am asking specific questions likely to elicit specific responses. I am speculating.
asr, you wrote:
...The word we usually use for intelligent violence is "ruthless" or "cunning" -- and many people are described that way. Stalin, for instance, was apparently capable of long hours of hard work, had an excellent attention to detail, and otherwise appears to have been a smart guy. Just also willing to have millions of people
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.