Agree. In particular, this passage here
What if another national power told that superintelligence to break all the secret codes and classified material that America's CIA and NSA use for national security? What if this superintelligence was told to hack into the mainframe computers tied to nuclear warheads, drones, and other dangerous weaponry? What if that superintelligence was told to override all traffic lights, power grids, and water treatment plants in Europe? Or Asia? Or everywhere in the world except for its own country?
makes me think Istvan really doesn't understand what a "superintelligence" (or an "intelligence") is.
To give him the benefit of doubt, he might be choosing his arguments based on what he expects his readers to understand. Skimming some of the comments to that article suggests that even this simplified example might have been of excessive inferential distance to some readers.
The "let's hope the first superintelligent belongs to the US" could be steelmanned as "let's hope that the values of the first superintelligence are based on those of Americans rather than the Chinese", which seems reasonable given that there's no guarantee that peo...
From this article by Zoltan Istvan, in regards to the looming Global AI Arms race, he says:
Now, to some extent I expect many Americans, on reflection, would at least partly agree with the above statement - and that should be concerning.
Consider the issue from the perspective of Russian, Chinese (or really any foreign) readers with similar levels of national pride.
One equivalent postionally reflected statement from a foreign perspective might read like this:
On a related note, there was an interesting panel recently with Robin Li (CEO of Baidu), Bill Gates, and Elon Musk. They spent a little time discussing AI superintelligence. Robin Li mentioned that his new head of research - Andrew Ng - doesn't believe superintelligence is an immediate threat. In particular Ng said: "Worrying about AI risk now is like worrying about overpopulation on Mars." Li also mentioned that he has been advocating for a large chinese government investment in AI.