Whether the project reached the desired goal, versus whether that goal will actually work.
Okay, but I still don't understand how a project with lower probability of "actually working" can be of higher expected value. I'm referring to this statement:
I think the expected gain from pursuing FAI is less that pursuing other methods. Other methods are less likely to work...
The argument you seem to be giving in support of higher expected value of other methods is that they are "more likely to be implementable" (a project reaching its stated goal, even if that goal turns out to be no good), but I don't see how is that an interesting property.
He didn't say other architectures would be no good, he said they're less likely to be safe.
He thinks the distribution P(Outcome | do(complete Oracle AI project)) isn't as highly peaked at Weirdtopia as P(outcome | do(complete FAI)); Oracle AI puts more weight on regions like "Lifeless universe", "Eternal Torture", "Rainbows and Slow Death", and "Failed Utopia".
However, "Complete FAI" isn't an actionable procedure, so he examines the chance of completion conditional on different actions he can take. "...
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.