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 murdered.
My point regarding mindless violence verses ruthlessness or cunning is that ruthlessness or cunning do not specifically define intelligence or violence in the blatant way which the phrase "mindless violence" does. Saddam and Gaddafi were cunning in a similar way to Stalin but the deaths of Saddam and Gaddafi indicate their cunning was not intelligent, in fact it is very stupid to die so close to Singularitarian immortality.
I am not asserting this proves all violence is mindless thus violence decreases with greater intelligence. I am simply offering food for thought. It is not a scientific thesis I am presenting. I am merely throwing some ideas out there to see how people respond.
If Stalin was truly intelligent then I assume he opted for Cryonic preservation?
"...Stalin was injected with poison by the guard Khrustalev, under the orders of his master, KGB chief Lavrenty Beria. And what was the reason Stalin was killed?"
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/2793501.stm
Regarding stupidity and the armed forces I have addressed this elsewhere: http://lesswrong.com/lw/ajm/ai_risk_and_opportunity_a_strategic_analysis/5zgl
If Stalin was truly intelligent then I assume he opted for Cryonic preservation?
Almost no one, regardless of intelligence opts for cryonics. Moreover, cryonics was first proposed in 1962 by Robert Ettinger, 9 years after Stalin was dead. It is a bit difficult to opt for cryonics when it doesn't exist yet.
Saddam and Gaddafi were cunning in a similar way to Stalin but the deaths of Saddam and Gaddafi indicate their cunning was not intelligent, in fact it is very stupid to die so close to Singularitarian immortality.
It seems that you are using "i...
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.