It's hard to tell how seriously they really take risks from AI given those information.
Indeed. I feel the absence of good counter-arguments was a more useful indication than their eventual agreement.
Indeed. I feel the absence of good counter-arguments was a more useful indication than their eventual agreement.
How much evidence, that you are right, does the absence of counter-arguments actually constitute?
If you are sufficiently vague, say "smarter than human intelligence is conceivable and might pose a danger", it is only reasonable to anticipate counter-arguments from a handful of people like Roger Penrose.
If however you say that "1) it is likely that 2) we will create artificial general intelligence within this century that is 3)...
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.