I'm familiar with the Yudkowsky school of thought here; it's largely where my complaint about basing philosophy off of sci-fi stories comes from. Picking on some of the more obviously inane ideas that have come out of it, like Roko's Basilisk, is too easy, but the page you linked is a great example of the problem. I quote in full:
"In calculating CEV, an AI would predict what an idealized version of us would want, "if we knew more, thought faster, were more the people we wished we were, had grown up farther together". It would recursively iterate this prediction for humanity as a whole, and determine the desires which converge. This initial dynamic would be used to generate the AI's utility function."
This is too detached from the reality of AI development to be useful. I can't make a utility function like this, nor can you, nor can humanity. There's no reason to think a human-equivalent AI could either - the data for such a function doesn't exist, and can't exist because of how vague all the terms are. The current ML revolution is built on statistical pattern recognition. This definition would better fit a genie.
The fact that MIRI does no ML research and has no dialogue with the state of the craft only furthers my impression that it produces a lot of words with little substance.
Even if one still accepts the ultimate conclusions of the movement, using its AGI-focused rhetoric to justify restrictions on a simple image generator is silly.
I wouldn't make too restricted assumptions on the form of a future AGI though. I find theoretical projections from a more axiomatic level quite important. It's like making rules for nukes before they were invented by assuming an abstract apocalypse-capable weapon without knowledge of missiles or nuclear fission.
That being said, the absolute majority of AI safety theory seems to fall into the same pothole where philosophy falls; modelling the world through language-logic rather than probabilities. The example you quoted fits this category - it's way too specific and thus unlikely to be useful in any way, even though its wording may deceive its author to believe it to be an inescapable outcome.
"In calculating CEV, an AI would predict what an idealized version of us would want, "if we knew more, thought faster, were more the people we wished we were, had grown up farther together". It would recursively iterate this prediction for humanity as a whole, and determine the desires which converge. This initial dynamic would be used to generate the AI's utility function."
This is too detached from the reality of AI development to be useful. I can't make a utility function like this, nor can you, nor can humanity. There's no reason to think a human-equivalent AI could either - the data for such a function doesn't exist, and can't exist because of how vague all the terms are. The current ML revolution is built on statistical pattern recognition. This definition would better fit a genie.
The fact that MIRI does no ML research and has no dialogue with the state of the craft only furthers my impression that it produces a lot of words with little substance.
Even if one still accepts the ultimate conclusions of the movement, using its AGI-focused rhetoric to justify restrictions on a simple image generator is silly.