Well, firstly its good that the crowd is savy, but it might still be wise to prepare for strawman/fleshman attacks as well as steelmanned ones.
These are some more plausible criticisms:
(1) Moore's law seems to be slowing - this could be a speedbump before the next paradigm takes over, or it could be the start of stagnation, in which case the singularity is postponed. Of course, if humanity survives the singularity will happen eventually anyway, but if it is hundreds of years in the future it would probably be wiser focussing on promoting rationality/genetic engineering/other methods of improving biological intelligence as well as cryonics in the short term, and leaving work on FAI to future generations.
(2) It could be argued that FAI and perhaps de novo AGI as well is simply so hard we will never get it done in time. Eventually neuromorphic AI/WBE/ brute force evolutionary simulations will be developed (assuming that exponential progress in these fields holds) and we would be better of preparing for this case, perhaps by developing empathic neuromorphic AI, or developing a framework for uploads and humans to live without a Malthusian race to the bottom.
(3) The budget/number of people involved of MIRI is tiny compared to google and other entities which could plausibly design AI. Therefore many would argue that MIRI cannot develop AI first, and instead should focus on outreach towards other, larger, groups.
(4) Gwern seems to be going further, and arguing that we should advocate that nations should suppress technology.
In all of these cases, some sort of rationality outreach would seem to be the alternative, so you could still spin that as a positive.
(1) Moore's law seems to be slowing - this could be a speedbump before the next paradigm takes over, or it could be the start of stagnation, in which case the singularity is postponed.
The pithy one-liner comeback to this is that the human brain is an existence proof for a computer the size of the human brain with the performance of the human brain, and it seems implausible that nature arrived at the optimal basic design for neurons on (basically) its first try.
I'm giving a talk to the Boulder Future Salon in Boulder, Colorado in a few weeks on the Intelligence Explosion hypothesis. I've given it once before in Korea but I think the crowd I'm addressing will be more savvy than the last one (many of them have met Eliezer personally). It could end up being important, so I was wondering if anyone considers themselves especially capable of playing Devil's Advocate so I could shape up a bit before my talk? I'd like there to be no real surprises.
I'd be up for just messaging back and forth or skyping, whatever is convenient.