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A wag other than myself once summarized EY's other site as "wallowing in bias", which summarization did seem apt every time I overcame that tl;dr feeling and tried to wade through; I'll happily admit the possibility that there really is something nontrivial and worthwhile going on there, but the tone and contents were at more-than-a-glance indistinguishable from what people write when they are trying to convince themselves that they do believe in their heart what their mind wants to believe it believes.

As often, Dostoyevsky said it best:

He was one of those idealistic beings common in Russia, who are suddenly struck by some overmastering idea which seems, as it were, to crush them at once, and sometimes for ever. They are never equal to coping with it, but put passionate faith in it, and their whole life passes afterwards, as it were, in the last agonies under the weight of the stone that has fallen upon them and half crushed them.

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I don't know about that, I think it's good that someone is looking at the risks of runaway AI and similar things. Progress relies upon a certain diversity of thought, and that means that some people (and nearly all scientists) will end up wasting their lives looking down blind alleys, and none of us knows whether EY is one of them. Your Dostoyevsky quote could well apply to Einstein, for instance, in his later years.

There are blind alleys, and then there are ideas that make people want to psychoanalyze you. To hyperbolize a bit, but only a bit, worrying about runaway AI that has the potential to turn the universe into paperclips is about as useful as worrying about warp drives that damage spacetime. It's hard enough to create fictional technologies that require basic changes in our understanding of the laws of physics, let alone debug them before they are created, let alone debug them before we make the basic discoveries that make them possible, let alone make them provably safe before we make the basic discoveries that make them possible and before we even figure out how to prove that relatively simple programs won't crash.

I know of only one science fiction author who was honest enough to spell out the fact that his hypothetical runaway AI had to make several foundational breakthroughs in physics at just the right time in order to plausibly take off faster than anyone could stop it, or become as smart and powerful as singularitarians assume is possible. We have no evidence that the laws of physics in our universe allow that sort of thing. Most super-AI fiction (and everything written about super-AI is fiction at this point) either glosses over this by tacitly assuming that the plodding nature of human intelligence is the only real bottleneck to godhood (most transhumanists), or assumes that large numbers of humans will be incredibly incompetent (most mainstream AI fiction).

before we even figure out how to prove that relatively simple programs won't crash

You are forgetting the lessons of pragmatism. If AI can get a heuristic sense of whether a simple program will or won't crash with 99.999% accuracy in practice, then you already have a very useful tool.

What if the AI we produce turns out to to be a bit dimmer than us, but never tires, can reproduce just by making copies, and is tirelessly diligent? I suspect that such an AI could beat us in a war, despite our being arguably "smarter."

FAI advocates are not satisfied with a 99.999% chance that the universe will not be turned into a uniform distribution of paperclips.

99.999%? I'd totally take it.- if it was a real number, calculated by some trustworthy method, and not a bogus expert estimate.

Of course if you can do that, probability ~1 (i.e., proven theorem given that transistors obey stated axioms) is probably just as easy.

What if? Well then we'd pull out its power plug. Or build another AI and program it to be sympathetic to our needs. Or any of an infinite number of possible solutions, assuming we were the utter idiots necessary to not implement appropriate safeguards in the first place.

Look, anyone can come up with an infinite number of movie-plot scenarios where naive humans bumbled into technology that then destroyed them. You can say that about almost anything. In understanding DNA, we might accidentally create an unstoppable virus! In conducting space exploration, we may alert a hostile alien civilisation to our presence! In researching chemistry we may create ice-9! Etc etc etc until the end of time.

All of these, including EY's thesis, have one thing in common - the unjustified, massive expansion of a speculative and highly unlikely risk into a reason for retarding progress which would otherwise yield non-speculative, highly likely, extraordinarily beneficial gains.

What if? Well then we'd pull out its power plug.

I was just posing an interesting question, especially as regards to the whole notion of "superior" intelligence. Superior in what regards? By whose measure? Eliezer should be given credit for promoting an information theoretic approach to that question. At least that seems to be a fundamental measure with a good chance of escaping cultural biases concerning "intelligence."

I am certainly not in some simpleminded superior AI is going to kill us all camp. Perhaps we will have very powerful AI optimization tools that have no sense of self, or self-originating volition whatsoever. There would be no reason for such entities to act in their own self interest, and therefore no danger for their interests to conflict with our own. They would have the disadvantage, though, of never coming up with something neat on their own initiative. I think there's enough more than enough initiative from human sources. What's needed is better optimization.

(Of course, only one rogue self-directed AI entity escaping into the wild could possibly -- not certainly -- doom us all. But this is not a new kind of danger. We have been facing that sort of danger -- where one robust and virulent enough example could escape and wreak havoc -- from technologies based on molecular biology for a few years now. So far, so good.)

Progress relies upon a certain diversity of thought, and that means that some people (and nearly all scientists) will end up wasting their lives looking down blind alleys

I think the progress of civilization is largely dependent on this Genetic Algorithm-like search/optimization process. Individual lives in the struggle of progress are like bullets in a machine gun. We are like soldiers on a battlefield.

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