[Executive summary: solve the underlying causes of your problem by becoming Pope]

I think it's a mistake to focus too much on the case of one particular convert to Catholicism simply because you know her personally. To do that is to fall prey to the availability heuristic.

The root cause of your problem with your friend is that the Catholic Church exists as a powerful and influential organisation which continues to promote its weird dogma, polluting Leah's mind along with millions of others. Before investing time and effort trying to flip her back to the side of reason, you should consider whether you could destroy the Church and dam the river of poison at its source. I will now outline a metho

Don't you have eye tests and dental checkups on a precautionary basis?

I tend to view there as being a strong difference between "go for a 2 hour checkup" and "invest $28K in cryonics". I wasn't aware of the pre-emptive breast removals, though, that would definitely qualify as the sort of thing I was looking for - and I still wonder how common it is, amongst people who would benefit.

the fact that you assume people have to invest their own money

I'm not aware of any country whose socialized healthcare pays for cryonics, so cryonics is certainly an out-of-pocket cost. If I'm wrong, please let me know so that I can move ASAP :)

That does make me wonder if cryonics is a harder sell in countries with socialized healthcare, just because people aren't used to having to pay for healthcare at all. The US, at least, is used to the idea of spending money on that scale.

Wasn't there something similar a while ago? ... yes there was. I can reasonably assume there will be others in the future. You are trying to get people to donate by appealing to an artificial sense of urgency ("Now is your chance to" , "Donate now" ). Beware that this triggers dark arts alarm bells.

Nevertheless, I have now donated an amount of money.

It seems to me that most life-saving medical procedures are done at the time of need. People tend not to get their appendix removed "as a precaution", and the most preventative care I can think of is an annual visit and vaccinations (and somehow we have managed to get a small segment of the population stupid enough to start protesting even that...)

I have no clue what the numbers are, but how many people actually have a will? A medical directive? Actively engage in preventative care before they have a problem? How many people go so far as to invest a large sum of money in advance, to ensure their health?

The most I've heard of is basic lifestyle changes: exercise more, eat healthy, regular checkups. In a different vein, setting up a will or an advanced medical directive. That's it. I can't think of a single example of someone spending $10,000 today, in order to prevent something ten years down the road.

If IBM makes a superintelligent AI that wants to maximize their share price, it will probably do something less like invent brilliant IBM products, and more like hack the stock exchange, tell its computers to generate IBM's price by calling on a number in the AI's own memory, and then convert the universe to computronium in order to be able to represent as high a number as possible.

To build a superintelligence that actually maximizes IBM's share price in a normal way that the CEO of IBM would approve of would require solving the friendly AI problem but then changing a couple of lines of code. Part of what SIAI should be (and as far as I know, is) doing is trying to convince people like selfish IBM researchers that making an UnFriendly superintelligence would be a really bad idea even by their own selfish standards.

Another part is coming up with some friendly AI design ideas so that, if IBM is unusually sane and politicians are unusually sane and everyone is sane and we can make it to 2100 without killing ourselves via UnFriendly AI, then maybe someone will have a Friendly AI in the pipeline so we don't have to gamble on making it to 2200.

Also, the first rule of SIAI's assassinate unfriendly AI researchers program is don't talk about the assassinate unfriendly AI researchers program.

I downvoted you for suggesting in public that the SIAI kill people. Even if that's a good idea, which it probably isn't, the negative PR and subsequent loss of funding from being seen talking about it is such a bad idea that you should definitely not be talking about it on a public website. If you really want the SIAI to kill people, PM or email either 1) the people who would actually be able to make that change to SIAI policy, or 2) people you think might be sympathetic to your position (to have more support when you suggest 1).

If you have a rigorous, detailed theory of Friendliness, you presumably also know that creating an Unfriendly AI is suicide and won't do it. If one competitor in the race doesn't have the Friendliness theory or the understanding of why it's important, that's a serious problem, but I don't see any programmer who understands Friendliness deliberately leaving it out.

Also, what little I know about browser design suggests that, say, supporting the blink tag is an extra chunk of code that gets added on later, possibly with a few deeper changes to existing code. Friendliness, on the other hand, is something built into every part of the system--you can't just leave it out and plan to patch it in later, even if you're clueless enough to think that's a good idea.

If it's possible to make a Friendly superhuman AI that optimises CEV, then it's surely way easier to make an unFriendly superhuman AI that optimises a much simpler variable, like the share price of IBM.

Yes.

Long before a Friendly AI is developed, some research team is going to be in a position to deploy an unFriendly AI that tries to maximise the personal wealth of the researchers, or the share price of the corporation that employs them, or pursues some other goal that the rest of humanity might not like.

This sounds in the direction of modeling AGI researchers as selfish mutants. Other motivations (e.g. poor Friendliness theories) and accidents (by researchers who don't understand the danger, or underestimate what they've built) are also likely.

This matters, since if AGI researchers aren't selfish mutants, you can encourage them to see the need for safety, and this is one goal of SIAI's outreach.

you need to (a) lobby against AI research by any groups who aren't 100% committed to Friendly AI (pay off reactionary politicians so AI regulation becomes a campaign issue, etc.)

At the very least, this (or anything that causes lots of people with power/resources to take AI more seriously) has to be weighed against the risk of causing the creation of more serious AGI/"FAI" projects. (I expect communicating enough reasoning to politicians, the general public, etc. to make them able to distinguish between plausible and hopeless "FAI" projects to be basically impossible.)

Also, SIAI is small and has limited resources, and in particular, doesn't have the sort of political connections that would make this worth trying.

Your proposals are the kind of strawman utilitarianism that turns out to be both wrong and stupid, for several reasons.

Also, I don't think you understand what the SIAI argues about what an unFriendly intelligence would do if programmed to maximize, say, the personal wealth of its programmers. Short story, this would be suicide or worse in terms of what the programmers would actually want. The point at which smarter-than-human AI could be successfully abused by a selfish few is after the problem of Friendliness has been solved, rather than before.

It kind of seems like at the moment, you mainly want to find post-hoc reasons why the exercise was "useful".

I did use all of those reasons to justify why I thought I should do it beforehand. But I have noticed myself repeating those reasons to make myself feel more justified. (Also possible that my primary motivation in doing so in the first place was the social-skill development one)

In any case, I think your recommendations for how to proceed are good ones.