...because we can imagine them, they're probably possible, and if they're probably possible, then they're probable. [...] And whenever you say, "Omohundro says...", my response is, "Omohundro's arguments are informal and suggestive, but simply nowhere near conclusive...
Completely agree with your comment. Conceivability does not imply conceptuality, does not imply logical possibility, does not imply physical possibility, does not imply economic feasibility. Yet the arguments uttered on Less Wrong seldom go beyond conceivability.
When people in this community act as if they have knock-down arguments where there aren't any it makes SingInst and LessWrong look like weirdly overconfident end-of-the-world-mongers.
This is exactly the impression I got when I first started asking about risks from AI. Most of all comments I got have been incredible poor and without any substance. But the commentators do not notice that themselves because other people on lesswrong seemingly agree and they get upvoted. Yet nobody with the slightest doubts would be convinced.
All they manage to do is convince those who already hold the same set of beliefs or who fit a certain mindset.
The best you can do is to make pragmatic arguments that caution is a good idea because the stakes are high.
I just reread this post yesterday and found it to be a very convincing counter-argument against the idea that we should solely act on high stakes.
All they manage to do is convince those who already hold the same set of beliefs or who fit a certain mindset.
It's perhaps worth noting that this observation is true of most discussion about most even-mildly-controversial subjects on LessWrong—quantum mechanics, cryonics, heuristics and biases, ethics, meta-ethics, theology, epistemology, group selection, hard takeoff, Friendliness, et cetera. What confuses me is that LessWrong continues to attract really impressive people anyway; it seems to be the internet's biggest/best forum for interesting technica...
One of the most annoying arguments when discussing AI is the perennial "But if the AI is so smart, why won't it figure out the right thing to do anyway?" It's often the ultimate curiosity stopper.
Nick Bostrom has defined the "Orthogonality thesis" as the principle that motivation and intelligence are essentially unrelated: superintelligences can have nearly any type of motivation (at least, nearly any utility function-bases motivation). We're trying to get some rigorous papers out so that when that question comes up, we can point people to standard, and published, arguments. Nick has had a paper accepted that points out the orthogonality thesis is compatible with a lot of philosophical positions that would seem to contradict it.
I'm hoping to complement this with a paper laying out the positive arguments in favour of the thesis. So I'm asking you for your strongest arguments for (or against) the orthogonality thesis. Think of trying to convince a conservative philosopher who's caught a bad case of moral realism - what would you say to them?
Many thanks! Karma and acknowledgements will shower on the best suggestions, and many puppies will be happy.