(Another thread of this conversation is here.)
Yes, if we're talking about the overall chance of winning, but I was talking about the chance of winning through a specific scenario (directly building FAI). If the chance of that is tiny, why did your cost/benefit analysis of the proposed course of action (encouraging open FAI research) focus completely on it?
I see, I'm guessing you view the "second round" (post-WBE/human intelligence improvement) as not being similarly unlikely to eventually win. I agree that if the first round (working on FAI now, pre-WBE) has only a tiny chance of winning, while the second has a non-tiny chance (taking into account the probability of no catastrophe till the second round and it being dominated by a FAI project rather than random AGI), then it's better to sacrifice the first round to make the second round healthier. But I also only see a tiny chance of winning the second round, mostly because of the increasing UFAI risk and the difficulty of winning a race that grants you the advantages of the second round, rather than producing an UFAI really fast.
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.