officers are not rocket scientists on the intelligence scales.
Few people are. Officers can be quite intelligent and well-educated people. The military academies are some of the best educational institutions around, with selection standards more comparable to Harvard than community college. In one of my own communities, Haskell programmers, the top purely functional data structure guys, Okasaki, is a West Point instructor.
You should however note I was referring to the soldiers who actually commit the violent acts, thereby frequently getting themselves maimed or killed; these military personnel are stupid because it is stupid to put yourself needlessly into a dangerous, life threatening situation.
There's still a floor on their intelligence. Some of the research I alluded to showed that IQ advantages show up even in manual training and basic combat skills - the higher your IQ, the faster you learned and the higher your ultimate plateau was.
(This is consistent with the little I've read about top special forces members like Navy Seals and other operators: they tend to be extremely intelligent, thoughtful, with a multitude of skills and foreign languages. Secrecy means I do not know whether there is a selection bias operating here or how much is PR, but it is consistent with the previous observations and the extreme standards applied for membership.)
for me it is a derogatory term indicating a dim-witted pant-hooting grunting ape who doesn't have the intelligence to realise joining the army as a Grunt is not good for survival thus some would say stupid but I realise the Army doesn't accept clinically retarded Grunts...Do these dead men look intelligent?
Are you trying to troll me with awful arguments here? If so, I'm not biting.
I wonder if they were signed up for cryro-preservation?
To a first approximation, no one is signed up for cryonics - not even LWers. So mentioning it is completely futile.
Dear gwern, it all depends on how you define intelligence.
Google translate knows lots of languages. Goggle is a great information resource. Watson (the AI) appears to be educated, perhaps Watson could pass many exams, but Google and Watson are not intelligent.
Regarding the few people who are rocket scientists I wonder if the truly rare geniuses, the truly intelligent people, are less likely to be violent?
...Few people are. Officers can be quite intelligent and well-educated people. The military academies are some of the best educational institutions around,
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.