But it seems like SIAI has already deviated from the basement-style FAI plan, since it started supporting research associates who are allowed/encouraged to publish openly, and encouraging public FAI-related research in other ways (such as publishing a list of open problems). And if the "slippery slope" problems I described were already known, why didn't anyone bring them up during the discussions about whether to publish papers about UDT? (I myself only thought of them in the general explicit form yesterday.)
If SIAI already knew about these problems but still thinks it's a good idea to promote public FAI-related research and publish papers about decision theory, then I'm even more confused than before. I hope your series "gets there" soon so I can see where the cause of the disagreement lies.
What I'm saying is that there are costs and benefits to open FAI work. You listed some costs, but that doesn't mean there aren't also benefits. See, e.g. Vladimir's comment.
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.