Hey Wei, great question! Agents (augmented humans) with IQ of 250 would be superintelligent with respect to our current position on the intelligence curve and would be just as dangerous to us, unaugment humans, as any sort of artificial superintelligence. They would not be guaranteed to be Friendly by design and would be as foreign to us in their desires as most of us are from severely mentally retarded persons. For most of us (sadly?) such people are something to try and fix via science not something for whom we want to fulfill their wishes. In other words, I don’t think you can rely on unverified (for safety) agent (event with higher intelligence) to make sure that other agents with higher intelligence are designed to be human-safe. All the examples you give start by replacing humanity with something not-human (uploads, augments) and proceed to ask the question of how to safe humanity. At that point you already lost humanity by definition. I am not saying that is not going to happen, it probably will. Most likely we will see something predicted by Kurzweil (merger of machines and people).
I'm going to throw out some more questions. You are by no means obligated to answer.
In your AI Safety Engineering paper you say, "We propose that AI research review boards are set up, similar to those employed in review of medical research proposals. A team of experts in artificial intelligence should evaluate each research proposal and decide if the proposal falls under the standard AI – limited domain system or may potentially lead to the development of a full blown AGI."
But would we really want to do this today? I mean, in the near future--s...
A few notes about the site mechanics
A few notes about the community
If English is not your first language, don't let that make you afraid to post or comment. You can get English help on Discussion- or Main-level posts by sending a PM to one of the following users (use the "send message" link on the upper right of their user page). Either put the text of the post in the PM, or just say that you'd like English help and you'll get a response with an email address.
* Normal_Anomaly
* Randaly
* shokwave
* Barry Cotter
A note for theists: you will find the Less Wrong community to be predominantly atheist, though not completely so, and most of us are genuinely respectful of religious people who keep the usual community norms. It's worth saying that we might think religion is off-topic in some places where you think it's on-topic, so be thoughtful about where and how you start explicitly talking about it; some of us are happy to talk about religion, some of us aren't interested. Bear in mind that many of us really, truly have given full consideration to theistic claims and found them to be false, so starting with the most common arguments is pretty likely just to annoy people. Anyhow, it's absolutely OK to mention that you're religious in your welcome post and to invite a discussion there.
A list of some posts that are pretty awesome
I recommend the major sequences to everybody, but I realize how daunting they look at first. So for purposes of immediate gratification, the following posts are particularly interesting/illuminating/provocative and don't require any previous reading:
More suggestions are welcome! Or just check out the top-rated posts from the history of Less Wrong. Most posts at +50 or more are well worth your time.
Welcome to Less Wrong, and we look forward to hearing from you throughout the site!
Note from orthonormal: MBlume and other contributors wrote the original version of this welcome post, and I've edited it a fair bit. If there's anything I should add or update on this post (especially broken links), please send me a private message—I may not notice a comment on the post. Finally, once this gets past 500 comments, anyone is welcome to copy and edit this intro to start the next welcome thread.