I think the issue is that a lot of casual readers (/s/listeners, or whatever) of MIRI’s arguments about FAI threat get hung up on post- or mid-singularity AI takeover scenarios simply because they’re hard to “visualize”, having lots of handwavey free parameters like “technology level”. So even if the examples produced here don’t fill in necessarily highly plausible values for the free parameters, they can help less-imaginative casual readers visualize an otherwise abstract and hard-to-follow step in MIRI’s arguments. More rigorous filling-in of the parameters can occur later, or at a higher level.
That’s all assuming that this is being requested for the purposes of popular persuasive materials. I think the MIRI research team would be more specific and/or could come up with such things more easily on their own, if they needed scenarios for serious modeling or somesuch.
I think the issue is that a lot of casual readers (/s/listeners, or whatever) of MIRI’s arguments about FAI threat get hung up on post- or mid-singularity AI takeover scenarios simply because they’re hard to “visualize”, having lots of handwavey free parameters like “technology level”. So even if the examples produced here don’t fill in necessarily highly plausible values for the free parameters, they can help less-imaginative casual readers visualize an otherwise abstract and hard-to-follow step in MIRI’s arguments. More rigorous filling-in of the parameters can occur later, or at a higher level.
That’s all assuming that this is being requested for the purposes of popular persuasive materials. I think the MIRI research team would be more specific and/or could come up with such things more easily on their own, if they needed scenarios for serious modeling or somesuch.