It seems to me that there are two key points in Evans’s argument where he makes a controversial claim and needs to justify it, and that at both he kinda cheats.
The first is where he goes from a description of the “Pascal’s Mugging” scenario to saying that that’s a good way to describe concerns over unfriendly AI. (Rather than, e.g., seeing them as analogous to insurance, where one pays a modest but annoying sum for alleged protection against various unlikely but potentially devastating events.) He doesn’t make any attempt at all to justify this; I think he just hopes that the reader won’t notice.
The second is where he suggests that “some of those who advance [UFAI arguments]” are getting a lucrative income stream from doing so. It seems to me that actually awfully few are, and most of those could have got richer faster and more reliably by other more normal means. So if he’s saying about their motives what he seems to be, then again he really owes the reader some justification. Which, again, is not there.
(Maybe there’s a third. I think his last paragraph is just repeating the one that precedes it. But maybe he’s suggesting some other, more powerful “economic interests” at work; if so, it’s not at all clear to me who he has in mind.)
It seems to me that there are two key points in Evans’s argument where he makes a controversial claim and needs to justify it, and that at both he kinda cheats.
The first is where he goes from a description of the “Pascal’s Mugging” scenario to saying that that’s a good way to describe concerns over unfriendly AI. (Rather than, e.g., seeing them as analogous to insurance, where one pays a modest but annoying sum for alleged protection against various unlikely but potentially devastating events.) He doesn’t make any attempt at all to justify this; I think he just hopes that the reader won’t notice.
The second is where he suggests that “some of those who advance [UFAI arguments]” are getting a lucrative income stream from doing so. It seems to me that actually awfully few are, and most of those could have got richer faster and more reliably by other more normal means. So if he’s saying about their motives what he seems to be, then again he really owes the reader some justification. Which, again, is not there.
(Maybe there’s a third. I think his last paragraph is just repeating the one that precedes it. But maybe he’s suggesting some other, more powerful “economic interests” at work; if so, it’s not at all clear to me who he has in mind.)