Do you mean, competent people who are thinking 10 times faster than biological humans, or what ? This seems a bit of a stretch.
I mean exactly that. I'd be very surprised if ultimately, neuromorphic AIs would be impossible to run significantly faster than meat-ware. Because our brain is massively parallel, and because current microprocessors have massively faster serial speed than neurons. Now our brains aren't fully parallel, so I assumed an arbitrary speed-up limit. I said 10 times, but it would be probably still be incredibly dangerous at 2 or 3, or even lower.
Now do not forget the key word here: botnet. The team is supposed to duplicate itself many times over before trying to take over the world.
If it was this easy, some biological human (or a team of such humans) would've done it already, in 10 to 50 years or however long it takes.
I don't think so, because uploads have significant advantages over meat-ware.
Low cost of living. In a world where every middle class home can afford sufficient computing power for an upload (required to turn me into a botnet). Now try to beat my prices.
Being many copies of the same few original brains. It means TDT works better, and defection is less likely. This should solve
Even superpowers such as USA or China cannot dictate terms to the rest of the world.
Because once the self-duplicating team has independently taken economic control of most of the world, it is easy for it to accept the domination of one instance (I would certainly pre-commit to that). Now for the rest of humanity to accept such dominance, the uploads only have to use the resources they acquired for the individual perceived benefit of the meat bags.
Yep, that would be a full blown global conspiracy. While it's probably forever out of the reach of meat bags, I think a small team of self-replicating uploads can pull it out quite easily.
Hansonian tactics, which can further the productivity of the team, and therefore market power. (One have to be very motivated, or possibly crazy.)
Data-centres. The upload team can collaborate with or buy processor manufacturers, and build data-centres for more and more uploads to work on whatever is needed. This could further reduce the cost of living.
Now, I did make an unreasonable assumption: that only the original team would have those advantages. Most probably, there will be several such teams, possibly with different goals. The most likely result (without FOOM) is then a Hansonian outcome. That's no world domination, but I think it is just as dangerous (I would hate this world).
Finally, there is also the possibility of a de-novo AGI which would be just as competent as the best humans at most endeavours, though no faster. We already have an existence proof, so I think this is believable. I think such an AI would be even more dangerous than the uploaded team above.
I'd be very surprised if ultimately, neuromorphic AIs would be impossible to run significantly faster than meat-ware.
So would I. However, given our current level of technological development, I'd be very surprised if we had any kind of a neuromorphic AI at all in the near future (say, in the next 50 years). Still, I do agree with you in principle.
I said 10 times, but it would be probably still be incredibly dangerous at 2 or 3, or even lower.
There are tons of biological people alive today who are able to come up with solutions to problems 2x to 3x f...
If I understand the Singularitarian argument espoused by many members of this community (eg. Muehlhauser and Salamon), it goes something like this:
I'm in danger of getting into politics. Since I understand that political arguments are not welcome here, I will refer to these potentially unfriendly human intelligences broadly as organizations.
Smart organizations
By "organization" I mean something commonplace, with a twist. It's commonplace because I'm talking about a bunch of people coordinated somehow. The twist is that I want to include the information technology infrastructure used by that bunch of people within the extension of "organization".
Do organizations have intelligence? I think so. Here's some of the reasons why:
I talked with Mr. Muehlhauser about this specifically. I gather that at least at the time he thought human organizations should not be counted as intelligences (or at least as intelligences with the potential to become superintelligences) because they are not as versatile as human beings.
...and then...
I think that Muehlhauser is slightly mistaken on a few subtle but important points. I'm going to assert my position on them without much argument because I think they are fairly sensible, but if any reader disagrees I will try to defend them in the comments.
Mean organizations
* My preferred standard of rationality is communicative rationality, a Habermasian ideal of a rationality aimed at consensus through principled communication. As a consequence, when I believe a position to be rational, I believe that it is possible and desirable to convince other rational agents of it.