like Bostrom’s influential Superintelligence—Eliezer with the serial numbers filed off and an Oxford logo added
It’s not accurate that the key ideas of Superintelligence came to Bostrom from Eliezer, who originated them. Rather, at least some of the main ideas came to Eliezer from Nick. For instance, in one message from Nick to Eliezer on the Extropians mailing list, dated to Dec 6th 1998, inline quotations show Eliezer arguing that it would be good to allow a superintelligent AI system to choose own its morality. Nick responds that it’s possible for an AI system to be highly intelligent without being motivated to act morally. In other words, Nick explains to Eliezer an early version of the orthogonality thesis.
Nick was not lagging behind Eliezer on evaluating the ideal timing of a singularity, either—the same thread reveals that they both had some grasp of the issue. Nick said that the fact that 150,000 people die per day must be contextualised against “the total number of sentiences that have died or may come to live”, foreshadowing his piece on Astronomical Waste, that would be published five years later. Eliezer said that having waited billions of years, the probability of a success is more important than any delay of hundreds of years.
These are indeed two of the most-important macrostrategy insights relating to AI. A reasonable guess is that a lot of the big ideas in Superintelligence were discovered by Bostrom. Some surely came from Eliezer and his sequences, or from discussions between the two, and I suppose that some came from other utilitarians and extropians.
I think chapter 4, The Kinetics of an Intelligence Explosion, has a lot of terms and arguments from EY’s posts in the FOOM Debate. (I’ve been surprised by this in the past, thinking Bostrom invented the terms, then finding things like resource overhangs getting explicitly defined in the FOOM Debate.)
It’s not accurate that the key ideas of Superintelligence came to Bostrom from Eliezer, who originated them. Rather, at least some of the main ideas came to Eliezer from Nick. For instance, in one message from Nick to Eliezer on the Extropians mailing list, dated to Dec 6th 1998, inline quotations show Eliezer arguing that it would be good to allow a superintelligent AI system to choose own its morality. Nick responds that it’s possible for an AI system to be highly intelligent without being motivated to act morally. In other words, Nick explains to Eliezer an early version of the orthogonality thesis.
Nick was not lagging behind Eliezer on evaluating the ideal timing of a singularity, either—the same thread reveals that they both had some grasp of the issue. Nick said that the fact that 150,000 people die per day must be contextualised against “the total number of sentiences that have died or may come to live”, foreshadowing his piece on Astronomical Waste, that would be published five years later. Eliezer said that having waited billions of years, the probability of a success is more important than any delay of hundreds of years.
These are indeed two of the most-important macrostrategy insights relating to AI. A reasonable guess is that a lot of the big ideas in Superintelligence were discovered by Bostrom. Some surely came from Eliezer and his sequences, or from discussions between the two, and I suppose that some came from other utilitarians and extropians.
I think chapter 4, The Kinetics of an Intelligence Explosion, has a lot of terms and arguments from EY’s posts in the FOOM Debate. (I’ve been surprised by this in the past, thinking Bostrom invented the terms, then finding things like resource overhangs getting explicitly defined in the FOOM Debate.)