Wot cousin_it said.
Of course the model "OAIs are extremely dangerous if not properly contained; let's let everyone have one!" isn't going to work. But there are many things we can try with an OAI (building a FAI, for instance), and most importantly, some of these things will be experimental (the FAI approach relies on getting the theory right, with no opportunity to test it). And there is a window that doesn't exist with a genie - a window where people realise superintelligence is possible and where we might be able to get them to take safety seriously (and they're not all dead). We might also be able to get exotica like a limited impact AI or something like that, if we can find safe ways of experimenting with OAIs.
And there seems no drawback to pushing an UFAI project into becoming an OAI project.
Cousin_it's link is interesting, but it doesn't seem to have anything to do with OAI, and instead looks like a possible method of directly building an FAI.
Of course the model "OAIs are extremely dangerous if not properly contained; let's let everyone have one!" isn't going to work.
Hmm, maybe I'm underestimating the amount of time it would take for OAI knowledge to spread, especially if the first OAI project is a military one (on the other hand, the military and their contractors don't seem to be having better luck with network security than a...
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.