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) likely to undergo explosive recursive self-improvement, respectively become superhuman intelligent, 4) in a short enough time-frame to be uncontrollable, 5) to take over the universe in order to pursue its goals, 6) ignore 7) and thereby destroy all human values" and that "8) it is important to contribute money to save the world, 9) at this point in time, 10) by figuring out how to make such hypothetical AGI's provably friendly and 11) that the Singularity Institute, respectively the Future of Humanity Institute, are the right organisations for this job", then you can expect to hear counter-arguments.
If you weaken the odds of creating general intelligence to around 50-50, then virtually none have given decent counterarguments to 1)-7). The disconnect starts at 8)-11).
How much evidence, that you are right, does the absence of counter-arguments actually constitute?
Quite strong evidence, at least for my position (which has somewhat wider error bars that SIAI's). Most people who have thought about this at length tend to agree with me, and most arguments presented against it are laughably weak (hell, the best arguments against Whole Brain Emulations wer...
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.