I would agree that introducing a concept has connotations of considering the hypothesis that an instantiation of the concept exists or is possible, and without sufficient evidence to support the complexity of the concept, this is privileging the hypothesis, which is close enough to assuming the conclusion. However, it seems weird to make this criticism of "outcome pump" and "really powerful optimization process" and not make the same criticism of "artificial intelligence" when the former are attempts to avoid bad assumptions from connotations of the latter. When "intelligence" makes people think it must be human like, this makes "powerful artificial intelligence" a strictly more specific concept than "powerful optimization process".
I was under the impression that "artificial intelligence" is meant to differentiate human and machine "intelligence" along technical lines, not moral ones, i.e., to emphasize that they solve problems in technically different ways. "Outcome pump" and "really powerful optimization process" are meant to differentiate human and non-human "intelligence" along moral lines; the justification for this distinction is much less clear-cut. I don't criticize "artificial intelligence" much because it's empiric...
One of the most annoying arguments when discussing AI is the perennial "But if the AI is so smart, why won't it figure out the right thing to do anyway?" It's often the ultimate curiosity stopper.
Nick Bostrom has defined the "Orthogonality thesis" as the principle that motivation and intelligence are essentially unrelated: superintelligences can have nearly any type of motivation (at least, nearly any utility function-bases motivation). We're trying to get some rigorous papers out so that when that question comes up, we can point people to standard, and published, arguments. Nick has had a paper accepted that points out the orthogonality thesis is compatible with a lot of philosophical positions that would seem to contradict it.
I'm hoping to complement this with a paper laying out the positive arguments in favour of the thesis. So I'm asking you for your strongest arguments for (or against) the orthogonality thesis. Think of trying to convince a conservative philosopher who's caught a bad case of moral realism - what would you say to them?
Many thanks! Karma and acknowledgements will shower on the best suggestions, and many puppies will be happy.