Diego Caleiro · 2014-10-16 · EA Forum
The argument for differential progress has been made before by Bostrom a few times and Beckstead as well.
http://www.existential-risk.org/figure5.png
I can see six strategies which may prove fruitful to nourish differential technological progress:
1) Increasing safety savvy insight - e.g. helping with the AI control problem, perfecting our understanding of moral psychology, and of cultural evolution.
2) Decreasing rates of progress in dangerous areas - e.g. decelerating the brain emulation project, passing legislation anti-AI progress etc...
3) Diminishing the incentives which stimulate progress in undesirable areas - e.g. if aging is cured, chronologically old individuals no longer would have an incentive to accelerate the intelligence explosion.
4) Using a Scorched Earth strategy - e.g. if surpassing a threshold of average wealth would be risky, perhaps because some individuals would have enough power start a world-wrecking cascade, then burning resources now would guarantee that the future will be safer by being poorer.
5) Using a differentiated Scorched Earth strategy - e.g. try to predict which assets/valuables will be in the hands of those individuals who can start world destroying cascades in the future, and destroy non-liquid resources from that pool now. Whether non-liquid because rare, as enriched uranium, or non-liquid because hard to exchange, as private islands or old churches, the crucial consideration is whether destroying these resources now will counterfactually impede similar resources of being used at the time of their maximum destructive potential by these agents.
6) Finding whether there are more strategies not considered among the previous 5.
Which of these, if any, do you see as the lower hanging fruit for EAs? and why?
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