Extremely hard, more powerful than you can possibly imagine, but people will be free to opt out if they desire.
Consider the uploaded individual that decides to turn the entire planet into computronium or worse, turn the solar system into a Matrioshka brain. People opt out of that how?
Promote the idea of Post-Scarcity thus people in power will realise all wars are needless because all wars stem from resource scarcity
It isn't obvious to me that all wars stem from resource scarcity. Wars occur for a variety of reasons, of which resource scarcity is only one. Often wars have multiple underlying causes. Some wars apparently stem from ideological or theological conflicts (Vietnam, Korea, the Crusades) or from perceived need to deal with external threats before them become too severe (again the Crusades, but also the recent Iraq war (which yes, did have a resource aspect)). These are only some of the more prominent examples of what can cause war.
Dear JoshuaZ, regarding this:
"Consider the uploaded individual that decides to turn the entire planet into computronium or worse, turn the solar system into a Matrioshka brain. People opt out of that how?"
I consider such a premise to be so unlikely it is impossible. It is a very silly premise for three reasons.
Destroying the entire planet when there is a whole universe full of matter is insane. If insane people exist in the future post-intelligence-explosion upload-world then insane people will be dealt with thus no danger but insanity post
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.