"Superintelligent AIs" is not one thing, it's a class of quadrillions of different possible things. The old Eliezer was probably thinking of one thing when he referred to superintelligences. When you realize that SAIs are a category of beings with more potential diversity than all species that have ever lived, it's hard to side with them all as a group. You'd have to have poor aesthetics to value them all equally.

A long time ago, a different person who also happens to be named “Eliezer Yudkowsky” said that, in the event of a clash between human beings and superintelligent AIs, he would side with the latter. The Yudkowsky we all know rejects this position, though it is not clear to me why.

Not clear why? Because he likes people and doesn't want everyone he knows (including himself), everyone he doesn't know and any potential descendants of either to die? Doesn't that sound like a default position? Most people don't want themselves to go extinct.

Yeah, that's an interesting question. I'll offer a conjecture.

From my understanding, one of the fundamental assumptions of FAI is that there is somehow a stable moral attractor for every AI that is in the local neighborhood of its original goals, or perhaps only that this attractor is possible. No matter how intelligent the machine gets, no matter how many times it improves itself, it will consciously attempt to stay in the local neighborhood of this point (ala the Gandhi murder pill analogy).

If an AI is designed with a moral attractor that is essentially random, and thus probably totally antithetical to human values (such as paperclip manufacture), then it's hard to be on the side of the machines. Giving control of the world over to machine super-intelligences sounds like an okay idea if you imagine them growing, doing science, populating the universe, etc., but if they just tear apart the world to make paperclips in an exceptionally clever manner, then perhaps it isn't such a good idea. This is to say, if the machines use their intelligence to derive their morality, then siding with the machines is all well and good, but if their morality is programmed from the start, and the machines are merely exceptionally skilled morality executors, then there's no good reason to be on the sides of the machines just because they execute their random morality much more effectively.

I am fairly hesitant to agree with the idea of the moral attractor, along with the goals of FAI in general. I understand the idea only through analogy, which is to say not at all, and I have little idea what would dictate the peaks and valleys of a moral landscape, or even the coordinates really. It also isn't clear to me that a machine of such high intelligence would be incapable of forming new value systems, and perhaps discarding its preference for paper clips if there was no more paper to clip together.

While I'm exploring a very wide hypothesis space here about a person I know essentially nothing about, this sort of reasoning is at least consistent with what appears to be the thinking that undergirds work on FAI.

It also raises a very interesting question, which is perhaps more fundamental, and that is whether moral preferences are a function of intelligence or not. If so, the beings far more intelligent than us would presumably be more moral, and have a reasonable claim for our moral support. If not, then they're simply more clever and more powerful, and neither is a particularly good reason to welcome our robot overlords.

An idea I just had, which I'm sure others have considered, but I will merely note here, is that a recursively self-modifying AI would be subject to Darwinian evolution, with lines of code analogous to individual genes, and indeed if there is a stable attractor for such an AI, it seems likely to be about as moral as evolution. which is not particularly encouraging.