So should intelligence and autonomy be equated? If not, what is their relationship?
I think this is a very hard problem, and autonomy/agency might actually be even harder to measure/predict/create than intelligence. The question of free will, already really difficult, is just a special case of the question of what constitutes an agent. And to solve it we'd have to get past at least four problems that the study of intelligence doesn't have (anymore, to the same degree):
The knapsack problem and 3SAT are both NP-complete. Are they the same problem? No, strictly speaking. Yes, in a certain functional sense. A solution for one can be (computationally speaking) trivially transformed into a solution for the other.
I see the same applying to (general intelligence in tool mode) and (general intelligence in an autonomous mode). We will not live in a world in which one exists but the other is a ways off.
ETA: Differences of opinion regarding the definition of an agent and such reside in the map, not the territory. No matter what yo...
https://medium.com/backchannel/ai-wont-exterminate-us-it-will-empower-us-5b7224735bf3
(Slashdot discussion: http://tech.slashdot.org/story/14/12/10/1719232/ai-expert-ai-wont-exterminate-us----it-will-empower-us)
Not sure what the local view of Oren Etzioni or the Allen Institute for AI is, but I'm curious what people think if his views on UFAI risk. As far as I can tell from this article, it basically boils down to "AGI won't happen, at least not any time soon." Is there (significant) reason to believe he's wrong, or is it simply too great a risk to leave to chance?