Humans loyal to GSZ have had no effects that Garcia or I have been able to detect that you would label as particularly bad except for my advocacy of GSZ among the singularitarians.

What does endanger the humans is agents loyal to GSZ in a world in which it is widely known how to turn ordinary atoms like you might find in a rock or in a human body into a perfectly rational intelligent agent of known loyalty.

But I am not the one who is in a big hurry to bring about that world! The person in a big hurry to that end is Eliezer. So tell me again why I am the bad guy and Eliezer is the good guy.

After the singularity, humans are quite obsolete. By “obsolete” I mean that almost any end you care to choose is better served by disassambling a human into atoms and using the atoms to build an engineered intelligence than keeping the human whole.

Surely you do not deny that that is true!

Because they are quite obsolete and because it is difficult for barely-rational agents such as you or I or other human scientists to predict and control what almost-perfectly-rational superintelligences will do, it is quite difficult to think of any way to keep the humans alive after the singularity.

You probably already know this, but I will point it out anyway so that other readers do not get an unfairly negative impression of me: almost every proposal put forth since Eliezer declared his intention to bring about the singularity about 12 years ago immediately wipes out the humans. Eliezer will tell you that himself. That is true even though the main motivation of almost all of the proposals was to save, protect or help the humans. (In other words, the human-killing effect of the proposals is unintentional. But the humans would be just as dead as if it were intentional.)

The only two proposals that do not immediately wipe out the humans are Bill Joy’s proposal which he calls relinquishment put forward in 2000 that all governments should institute effective controls to prevent further research into AGI — and Eliezer’s CEV proposal put forward in 2004.

A researcher working for the Singularity Institute recently described CEV as a “request for proposals”. In other words, to say that the CEV proposal is incomplete or open to interpretation is not strong enough: to accurately describe it you have to say that it is not yet even a proposal.

Moreover, in the 5 years or so since Eliezer published his CEV request for proposals, no one has published or shown me any significant update or refinement of it. I wish someone would! It would get my prompt and sustained attention.

So to summarize, I recognize your objection as valid, but hasten to point out that it is an objection not to GSZ but rather to GSZ + singularity.

Also note that I am very open to compromise (and will ally myself only with singularitarians who I judge to share my openness to compromise). Although GSZ does not particularly want to keep the humans alive, it does not particularly need to kill or to frustrate them except where a human plan or a human ambition or a human desire would hog most the resources needed by GSZ. Consequently it should be relatively easy for an alliance of the humanists and the adherents of GSZ to steer reality into a future that is very satisfying to both.

I am not particularly swayed by your final paragraph, but do not have time to respond to it today.

This is an odd position for me to be in, because I flirted with this position myself, but I was only ever prepared to accept it on the empirical assumption that the particulars of human life were of so much instrumental value that, in reality, humans would always be around.

But after reading Eliezer and Greene, I see that this assumption is, in fact, false, and that if you place zero terminal value on human life, there are situations where you will be called upon to annihilate humanity.

GSZ would if implemented (with probability ~0.9 in my opinion) murder every human being in existence.

GSZ goes further, though. It would fill our future light cone with moral noise. Not only would there be no love, no romance, no friendship and no music and laughter, but there would not be persons or subjective experience. There would be no intellectual curiosity, no hope for a better world and no philosophy. GSZ would annihilate the potential for transhuman existence as well as all the extant human existence.

But I expect that that is not what you were thinking of — or at least that is not all of it. You believe that my choice of terminal values would probably strain the limits of my emotional mind even if I was surrounded by bright rational scientific friends who shared my values; don’t you?

But… you are certainly heading into territory that could best be described as “straining the limits of the human emotional mind”

– most people would diagnose you with a complex mental illness, you know…