I think death, and most extreme pain/suffering should be optional. Superintelligence, if done safely, lets us solve most of our problems.

The vast majority of pain and suffering in the world is already entirely optional, but as people we allow it to exist. How is another computer going to fix that?

It is far more likely that whoever controls a super intelligence uses it to gain more power and inflict far more suffering

what an asinine opinion. who allows death?

You misread. "Pain and suffering" not "death". Of all the pain and suffering in the world, a vast amount of it really is our own fault. Famines and wars shouldn't happen. And if you see a country border with poverty and one side and prosperity on the other you can't say that was the only possibility.

If humans could politically-economically deploy superintelligence safely, then we'd already have less extreme pain/suffering.

Unless there are countervailing forces, it will be deployed, capital will hoard the benefits, and everyone else will be told to fuck off.

I don't have faith in any of the AI labs to make hard financial decisions to deploy hypothetical future AGI in a way that's good for humanity as a whole.

There are too many incentives against, including extreme personal financial incentives for key AI lab stakeholders against.

And if we should take anything from tech history, it's that an exceedingly small number of people look fuck-you money in the face and say "Naw, I'd rather do what I believe in."

Capital hoards benefits because resource scarcity and cost of production are a thing

Post scarcity societies would likely have entirely different dynamics

Transitioning to a post scarcity society requires broad, accessible dissemination of post scarcity production methods.

What was the first thing we did when we digitized media and therefore made it copyable at negligible per unit cost?

Spent a huge amount of time and money to artificially reimplement scarcity via DRM.

Scarcity-based capital interests (read: most) are not going to willingly give up their profit engines.

We're already physically running out of materials to cheaply build infrastructure. I'm not sure how solving the economy needing humans translates to humans having more things -- short of "turning off" the consumers to conserve resources, and taking the things that they may have otherwise consumed.

> Superintelligence, if done safely, lets us solve most of our problems.

This is an interesting problem to explore. IMO most problems in the world are political. It's still likely that SI will solve them but it will take (many) years.

If certain political problems to be solved are zero-sum, and others are win-win, I'm not sure how adding more intelligence will solve the problem of the zero-sum ones that are the source of conflict and resource constraints.

The premise (hypothesis?) that all political problems are resource problems is also a curious one.

What is your position on middle of the road pain and suffering?

There's an app for that.

No it won't.

What? psychologists are for that (or drugs and alcohol).

Neat. I didn't know psychologists could cure terminal cancer!

> What’s with fascination with agi/superintelligence

We had relative strength, we needed more strength, we built cranes;

there was something like intelligence, we needed more intelligence, we sought to fill the need;

we were rightly fascinated with intelligence, we studied intelligence itself, we wanted to build it...

And then somebody built things that looked like intelligence, and very rightly some said "Oh, now we have to get to the Real Thing with urgency".