No, "intelligence" is an issue of survival, it is intelligent to survive. Survival is a key aspect of intelligence. I do want to survive but the intelligent course of action of not merely what I would do. The sensibleness, the intelligence of survival, is something beyond myself, it is applicable to other beings, but people do disagree regarding the definition of intelligence. Some people think it is intelligent to die.
You need to be more precise about what you mean by "intelligent" then, since your usage is either confused or is being communicated very poorly. Possibly consider tabooing the term intelligent.
You seemed elsewhere in this thread to consider Einstein intelligent, but if self-preservation matters for intelligence, then this doesn't make much sense. Any argument of the form "Stalin wasn't intelligent since he didn't use cryonics" is just as much of a problem for Einstein, Bohr, Turing, Hilbert, etc.
truly intelligent people would not need other thinkers to inspire their thinking
Yeah, see this isn't how humans work. We get a lot of different ideas from other humans, we develop them, and we use them to improve our own ideas by combining them. This is precisely why the human discoveries that have the most impact on society are often those which are connected to the ability to record and transmit information.
It seems that what you are doing here is engaging in the illusion of transparency where because you know of an idea, you consider the idea to be obvious or easy.
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.