Appologies for the provacative phrasing--I was (inadvertently) asking for a heated reply...
But to clarify the point in light of your response (which no doubt will get another heated reply, though honestly trying to convey the point w/out provoking...):
Piles of radioactive material is not a good analogy here. But I think it's appearance here is a good illustration of the very thing I'm hoping to convey: There are a lot of (vague, wrong) theories of AGI which map well to the radioactive pile analogy. Just put enough of the ingredients together in a pile, and FOOM. But the more you actually work on AGI, the more you realize how heuristic, incremental, and data bound it is; how a fantastic solution to monkey problems (vision, planning, etc) confers only the weakest ability in symbolic domains, and that, for instance, NP problems most likely remain NP hard regardless of intelligence, and their solutions are limited by time, space, and energy constraints--not cleverness. Can a hyper-intelligent AI improve upon hardware design, etc, etc? Sure! But the whole system (of progress) we're speaking of is a large complex system of differential equations with many bottlenecks, at least some of which aren't readily amendable to hyper-exponential change. Will there be a point where things are out of our (human) hands? Yes. Will it happen over night? No.
The radioactive pile analogy fails because AGI will not be had by heaping a bunch of stuff in a pile--it will be had through extensive engineering and design. It will progress incrementally, and it will be bounded by resource constraints--for a long long time.
A better analogy might be to building a fusion reactor. Sure, you have to be careful, especially in the final design, construction, and execution of the full scale device, but there's a huge amount of engineering to be done before you get anywhere near having to worry about that, and tons of smaller experiments that need to be proven first, and so on. And you learn as you go, and after years of work you start getting closer and you know a shitload about the technology and what it's quirks and hazards are and what's easy to control, and so on.
And when you're there -- well along the way, and you understand the technology to a deep level even if you haven't quite figured out how to make the sustainable fusion reactor yet -- it's pretty insulting/annoying when someone who doesn't have any practical(!) grasp of the matter comes along and tells you you shouldn't be working on this because they haven't figured out how to make it safe yet! And because they think that if you put too much stuff in a pile, it will go boom! (Sigh!) You're on your way to making clean energy before the peak oil appocolypse or whatever, and they're working against you (if only they knew what their efforts were costing the world).
What do you do there? They're fearful because they don't understand, and the particulars of their fear are, really, superstition (in the sense that they are not founded on a solid understanding, but quite specifically on a lack thereof). You want to say: get up to speed, and you can help us make this work and make it safe (and when you understand it better, you'll start to actually understand how that might be done--and how much less of an explosive problem it is than you think). But GTF out of my way if you're just going to pontificate from ignorance and try to dictate how I do my job from there. No matter how long you sofa-think about how to keep the pile-o-stuff from going bad-FOOM, your answers are never going to mesh with reality because you've got way too many false premises that need to be sifted out first (through actual experience in the topic). [And, sorry, but no matter how big Eliezer's cloud of self-citations is, that's just someone else's sofa-think, not actual experience.]
Personally, I do not think FAI is a hard problem (a highly educated opinion, not offhand dismissal). But I also know that UAI is going to happen eventually (intentionally), no matter how many conferences y'all have. And I also know the odds are highest of all we'll all die of old age because AI didn't happen well enough soon enough. But I understand if you disagree.
"but almost no one anywhere has ever heard of AI friendliness"
Ok, if this is your vantage point, I understand better. I must hang in the wrong circles 'cause I meet far more FAI than AGI folks.
Yes, I understand that. But it matters a lot what premises underlie AGI how self-modification is going to impact it. The stronger fast-FOOM arguments spring from older conceptions of AGI. Imo, a better understanding of AGI does not support it.
Thanks much for the interesting conversation, I think I am expired.
See reply below to drethlin.
Sigh.
Ok, I see the problem with this discussion, and I see no solution. If you understood AGI better, you would understand why your reply is like telling me I shouldn't play with electricity because Zeus will get angry and punish the village. But that very concern prevents you from understanding AGI better, so we are at an impasse.
It makes me sad, because with the pervasiveness of this superstition, we've lost enough minds from our side that the military will probably beat us to it.
Just to follow up, I'm seeing nothing new in IEM (or if it's there it's too burried in "hear me think" to find--Eliezer really would benefit from pruning down to essentials). Most of it concerns the point where AGI approaches or exceeds human intelligence. There's very little to support concern for the long ramp up to that point (other than some matter of genetic programming, which I haven't the time to address here). I could go on rather at length in rebuttal of the post-human-intelligence FOOM theory (not discounting it entirely, but putting certain qualitative bounds on it that justify the claim that FAI will be most fruitfully pursued during that transition, not before it), but for the reasons implied in the original essay and in my other comments here, it seems moot against the overriding truth that AGI is going to happen without FAI regardless--which means our best hope is to see AGI+FAI happen first. If it's really not obvious that that has to lead with AGI, then tell me why.
Does anybody really think they are going to create an AGI that will get out of their hands before they can stop it? That they will somehow bypass ant, mouse, dog, monkey, and human and go straight to superhuman? Do you really think that you can solve FAI faster or better than someone who's invented monkey-level AI first?
I feel most of this fear is risidual leftovers from the self-modifying symbolic-program singularity FOOM theories that I hope are mostly left behind by now. But this is just the point -- people who don't understand real AGI don't understand what the real risks are and aren't (and certainly can't mediate them).
Well, then, I hope it's someone like you or me that's at the button. But that's not going to be the case if we're working on FAI instead of AGI, is it...
Let's imagine you solve FAI tomorrow, but not AGI. (I see it as highly improbable that anyone will meaningfully solve FAI before solving AGI, but let's explore that optimistic scenario.) Meanwhile, various folks and institutions out there are ahead of you in AGI research by however much time you've spent on FAI. At least one of them won't care about FAI.
I have a hard time imagining any outcome from that scenario that doesn't involve you wishing you'd been working on AGI and gotten there first. How do you imagine the outcome?
Which do you think is more likely: That you will die of old age, or of unfriendly-AI? (Serious question, genuinely curious.)
I think it will be incidental to AGI. That is, by the time you are approaching human-level AGI it will be essentially obvious (to the sort of person who groks human-level AGI in the first place). Motivation (as a component of the process of thinking) is integral to AGI, not some extra thing only humans and animals happen to have. Motivation needs be grokked before you will have AGI in the first place. Human motivational structure is quite complex, with far more alterior motives (clan affiliation, reproduction, etc) than straightforward ones. AGIs needn't be so-burdened, which in many ways makes the FAI problem easier in fact than our human-based intuition might surmise. On the other hand, simple random variation is a huge risk--that is, no matter the intentional agenda, there is always the possibility that a simple error will put that very abstract coefficient of feedback over unity, and then you have a problem. If AGI weren't going to happen regardless, I might say it's worthy of a debate now what the nature of that problem would be (but in that debate, I still say it's not a huge problem--it's not instantaneous FOOM, it's time-to-uplug FOOM; and you have the advantage of other FAIs by then with full ability to analyze each other so you actually have a lot of tools available to put out fires long before they're raging); but AGI is going to happen regardless, so the race is not FAI vs. AGI, but whether the first to solve AGI wants FAI or something else. And like I say, there is also the race against our own inevitable demise of old age (talk to anybody who's been in the longevity community for > 20 years and you will learn they once had your optimism about progress).
Don't get me wrong, FAI is not an uninteresting problem. My claim is quite simply that for the goals of the FAI community (which I have to assume includes your own long-term survival), y'all would do far better to be working (hard and seriously) on AGI than not. All of this sofa-think today will be replicated in short order by better-informed consideration down the road. And I aint sayin' don't think about it today -- I'm saying find a realistic balance between FAI and AGI research that doesn't leave you so far behind the game that your goals never get to matter, and I'm sayin' that's 99% AGI research and 1% FAI (for now). (And no, that doesn't mean 99 people doing AGI and 1 doing FAI. My point is the 1 doing FAI is useless if they aren't 99% steeped in AGI from which to think about FAI in the first place.)