Dear Mictchell, I think your unaware emotional bias causes you to read too much into my Self-Fulfilling-Prophecy references. My Singularity activism is based on the Self-Fulfilling-Prophecy phenomenon but I don't stipulate who it applies to. It could apply to myself, namely that utopia (Post-Scarcity) was not possible but I am making it possible via the manifestation of my expectations, or the prophecy could apply to pessimists who falsely think utopia is not possible but via the manifestation of their pessimistic expectations the pessimists are acting contrary to reality, they are also making their pessimistic views real via their Self-Fulfilling-Prophecy.
Instead if trying to create utopia it could be that utopia is or should be inevitable but pessimists are suppressing utopia via their Self-Fulfilling-Prophecies thus I am countering the Self-Fulfilling-Prophecies of pessimists, which is the creative process of my Singularity activism.
The reason why all humans make statements is due to their emotions. All statements by humans are emotional. To suggest otherwise indicates delusion, defect of reason, unaware bias.
I offer no current Post-Scarcity proposals to create PS now. I merely state the transition to Post-Scarcity can be accelerated. The arrival of the Singularity can be accelerated. This is the essence of Singularitarianism. When I state PS will occur soon I mean soon in the context of near regarding the Singularity being near, but it is not near enough to be tomorrow or next year, it is about 33 years away at the most. Surely you noticed my references to the year 2045 on my site, regarding information which you are under the false impression you carefully digested?
My ideas about intelligence are based on my brain which surely is a good starting point for intelligence? The brain? I could define intelligence from the viewpoint of other brain but I find the vast majority of brains cannot think logically, they are not intelligent. Many people cannot grasp logic.
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.