As I clarified in a subsequent comment in that thread, "if the FAI concludes that replacing a physical person with a software copy isn't a harmless operation, it could instead keep physical humans around and place them into virtual environments Matrix-style."
We could argue about whether to build an FAI that can make this kind of decision on its own, but I had no intention of doing anyone any harm. Yes the attempted-FAI may reach this conclusion erroneously and end up killing everyone, but then any method of building an FAI has the possibility of something going wrong and everyone ending up dead.
What's most alarming is that you've done work for SIAI.
I've never received any money from them and am not even a Research Associate. I have independently done work that may be useful for SIAI, but I don't think that's the same thing from a PR perspective.
The whole point of SIAI is not to go "Let's let the AGI decide what is ethical" but "Let's iron out all the ethical problems before making an AGI!"
Actually I think SIAI's official position is something like "Let's work out all the problems involved in letting the AGI decide what is ethical." If you disagree with this, let's argue about it, but could you please stop saying that I advocate killing people?
I had no intention of doing anyone any harm.
I know.
could you please stop saying that I advocate killing people?
reviews my wording very carefully
"If virtualizing people is violence ... Wei_Dai ... seems to be advocating "
"Advocating for an AGI that will kill all of humanity (in the context of this is not what you said) vs. advocating for an AGI that could kill all of humanity (context: this is what you said)"
My understanding is that it's your perspective that copying people and removing the physical original might not be killin...
New proposed censorship policy:
Any post or comment which advocates or 'asks about' violence against sufficiently identifiable real people or groups (as opposed to aliens or hypothetical people on trolley tracks) may be deleted, along with replies that also contain the info necessary to visualize violence against real people.
Reason: Talking about such violence makes that violence more probable, and makes LW look bad; and numerous message boards across the Earth censor discussion of various subtypes of proposed criminal activity without anything bad happening to them.
More generally: Posts or comments advocating or 'asking about' violation of laws that are actually enforced against middle-class people (e.g., kidnapping, not anti-marijuana laws) may at the admins' option be censored on the grounds that it makes LW look bad and that anyone talking about a proposed crime on the Internet fails forever as a criminal (i.e., even if a proposed conspiratorial crime were in fact good, there would still be net negative expected utility from talking about it on the Internet; if it's a bad idea, promoting it conceptually by discussing it is also a bad idea; therefore and in full generality this is a low-value form of discussion).
This is not a poll, but I am asking in advance if anyone has non-obvious consequences they want to point out or policy considerations they would like to raise. In other words, the form of this discussion is not 'Do you like this?' - you probably have a different cost function from people who are held responsible for how LW looks as a whole - but rather, 'Are there any predictable consequences we didn't think of that you would like to point out, and possibly bet on with us if there's a good way to settle the bet?'
Yes, a post of this type was just recently made. I will not link to it, since this censorship policy implies that it will shortly be deleted, and reproducing the info necessary to say who was hypothetically targeted and why would be against the policy.