I think you are missing a crucial point here. It might be the case (arguably, it is likely to be the case) that the only feasible way to construct a human level AGI without mind uploading (WBE) is to create a self-improving AGI. Such an AGI will start from subhuman intelligence but use its superior introspection and self-modification powers to go supercritical and rapidly rise in intelligence.
Seems unlikely. If this seed AI is the most intelligent thing humans can design, and yet it is significantly less intelligent than humans, how can it design something more intelligent than itself?
Software development is hard. We don't know any good heuristic to approach it with a narrow AI like a chess playing engine. We can automate some stuff, like compiling from an high-level programming language to machine code, performing type checking and some optimizations. But automating "coding" (going from a specification to a runnable program) or the invention of new algorithms are probably "AI-complete" problems: we would need an AGI, or something remarkably close to it, in order to do that.
Assuming we don't have an automatic shut-down triggered by the AGI reaching a certain level of intelligence (since it's completely unclear how to implement one), the AGI might go superhuman rapidly after reaching human level intelligence, w/o anyone having the chance to stop it.
Even if it can self-improve its code, and this doesn't quickly run into diminishing returns (which is a quite likely possibility), it would still have limited hardware resources and limited access to outside knowledge. Having, say, a SAT solver which is 5x faster than the industry state of the art won't automatically turn you into an omniscient god.
As a side note, it is not possible to meaningfully prevent a program from self-modifying if it is running on a universal Turing machine.
An universal Turing machine is not physically realizable, but even if it was, your claim is false. Running Tetris on an UTM won't result in self-modification.
Arbitrary code execution is always possible, at least with a mild performance penalty (the program can always implement an interpreter).
Only if the program has access to an interpreter that can execute arbitrary code.
Seems unlikely. If this seed AI is the most intelligent thing humans can design, and yet it is significantly less intelligent than humans, how can it design something more intelligent than itself?
Because humans are not optimized for designing AI. Evolution is much less intelligent than humans and yet it designed something more intelligent than itself: humans. Only it did it very inefficiently and it doesn't bootstrap. But it doesn't mean you need something initially as intelligent as a human to do it efficiently.
...But automating "coding" (goin
TL;DR
A serious possibility is that the first AGI(s) will be developed in a Manhattan Project style setting before any sort of friendliness/safety constraints can be integrated reliably. They will also be substantially short of the intelligence required to exponentially self-improve. Within a certain range of development and intelligence, containment protocols can make them safe to interact with. This means they can be studied experimentally, and the architecture(s) used to create them better understood, furthering the goal of safely using AI in less constrained settings.
Setting the Scene
Technological and/or Political issues could force the development of AI without theoretical safety guarantees that we'd certainly like, but there is a silver lining
A lot of the discussion around LessWrong and MIRI that I've seen (and I haven't seen all of it, please send links!) seems to focus very strongly on the situation of an AI that can self-modify or construct further AIs, resulting in an exponential explosion of intelligence (FOOM/Singularity). The focus on FAI is on finding an architecture that can be explicitly constrained (and a constraint set that won't fail to do what we desire).
My argument is essentially that there could be a critical multi-year period preceding any possible exponentially self-improving intelligence during which a series of AGIs of varying intelligence, flexibility and architecture will be built. This period will be fast and frantic, but it will be incredibly fruitful and vital both in figuring out how to make an AI sufficiently strong to exponentially self-improve and in how to make it safe and friendly (or develop protocols to bridge the even riskier period between when we can develop FOOM-capable AIs and when we can ensure their safety).
The requirement for a hard singularity, an exponentially self-improving AI, is that the AI can substantially improve itself in a way that enhances its ability to further improve itself, which requires the ability to modify its own code; access to resources like time, data, and hardware to facilitate these modifications; and the intelligence to execute a fruitful self-modification strategy.
The first two conditions can (and should) be directly restricted. I'll elaborate more on that later, but basically any AI should be very carefully sandboxed (unable to affect its software environment), and should have access to resources strictly controlled. Perhaps no data goes in without human approval or while the AI is running. Perhaps nothing comes out either. Even a hyperpersuasive hyperintelligence will be slowed down (at least) if it can only interact with prespecified tests (how do you test AGI? No idea but it shouldn't be harder than friendliness). This isn't a perfect situation. Eliezer Yudkowsky presents several arguments for why an intelligence explosion could happen even when resources are constrained, (see Section 3 of Intelligence Explosion Microeconomics) not to mention ways that those constraints could be defied even if engineered perfectly (by the way, I would happily run the AI box experiment with anybody, I think it is absurd that anyone would fail it! [I've read Tuxedage's accounts, and I think I actually do understand how a gatekeeper could fail, but I also believe I understand how one could be trained to succeed even against a much stronger foe than any person who has played the part of the AI]).
But the third emerges from the way technology typically develops. I believe it is incredibly unlikely that an AGI will develop in somebody's basement, or even in a small national lab or top corporate lab. When there is no clear notion of what a technology will look like, it is usually not developed. Positive, productive accidents are somewhat rare in science, but they are remarkably rare in engineering (please, give counterexamples!). The creation of an AGI will likely not happen by accident; there will be a well-funded, concrete research and development plan that leads up to it. An AI Manhattan Project described above. But even when there is a good plan successfully executed, prototypes are slow, fragile, and poor-quality compared to what is possible even with approaches using the same underlying technology. It seems very likely to me that the first AGI will be a Chicago Pile, not a Trinity; recognizably a breakthrough but with proper consideration not immediately dangerous or unmanageable. [Note, you don't have to believe this to read the rest of this. If you disagree, consider the virtues of redundancy and the question of what safety an AI development effort should implement if they can't be persuaded to delay long enough for theoretically sound methods to become available].
A Manhattan Project style effort makes a relatively weak, controllable AI even more likely, because not only can such a project implement substantial safety protocols that are explicitly researched in parallel with primary development, but also because the total resources, in hardware and brainpower, devoted to the AI will be much greater than a smaller project, and therefore setting a correspondingly higher bar for the AGI thus created to reach to be able to successfully self-modify itself exponentially and also break the security procedures.
Strategies to handle AIs in the proto-Singularity, and why they're important
First, take a look the External Constraints Section of this MIRI Report and/or this article on AI Boxing. I will be talking mainly about these approaches. There are certainly others, but these are the easiest to extrapolate from current computer security.
These AIs will provide us with the experimental knowledge to better handle the construction of even stronger AIs. If careful, we will be able to use these proto-Singularity AIs to learn about the nature of intelligence and cognition, to perform economically valuable tasks, and to test theories of friendliness (not perfectly, but well enough to start).
"If careful" is the key phrase. I mentioned sandboxing above. And computer security is key to any attempt to contain an AI. Monitoring the source code, and setting a threshold for too much changing too fast at which point a failsafe freezes all computation; keeping extremely strict control over copies of the source. Some architectures will be more inherently dangerous and less predictable than others. A simulation of a physical brain, for instance, will be fairly opaque (depending on how far neuroscience has gone) but could have almost no potential to self-improve to an uncontrollable degree if its access to hardware is limited (it won't be able to make itself much more efficient on fixed resources). Other architectures will have other properties. Some will be utility optimizing agents. Some will have behaviors but no clear utility. Some will be opaque, some transparent.
All will have a theory to how they operate, which can be refined by actual experimentation. This is what we can gain! We can set up controlled scenarios like honeypots to catch malevolence. We can evaluate our ability to monitor and read the thoughts of the agi. We can develop stronger theories of how damaging self-modification actually is to imposed constraints. We can test our abilities to add constraints to even the base state. But do I really have to justify the value of experimentation?
I am familiar with criticisms based on absolutley incomprehensibly perceptive and persuasive hyperintelligences being able to overcome any security, but I've tried to outline above why I don't think we'd be dealing with that case.
Political issues
Right now AGI is really a political non-issue. Blue sky even compared to space exploration and fusion both of which actually receive funding from government in substantial volumes. I think that this will change in the period immediately leading up to my hypothesized AI Manhattan Project. The AI Manhattan Project can only happen with a lot of political will behind it, which will probably mean a spiral of scientific advancements, hype and threat of competition from external unfriendly sources. Think space race.
So suppose that the first few AIs are built under well controlled conditions. Friendliness is still not perfected, but we think/hope we've learned some valuable basics. But now people want to use the AIs for something. So what should be done at this point?
I won't try to speculate what happens next (well you can probably persuade me to, but it might not be as valuable), beyond extensions of the protocols I've already laid out, hybridized with notions like Oracle AI. It certainly gets a lot harder, but hopefully experimentation on the first, highly-controlled generation of AI to get a better understanding of their architectural fundamentals, combined with more direct research on friendliness in general would provide the groundwork for this.