It’s quite likely you can solve the problem of people miss-associating SI with “accelerating change“ without having to change names.
The AI researcher saw the word ‘Singularity’ and, apparently without reading our concise summary, sent back a critique of Ray Kurzweil’s “accelerating change” technology curves.
What if the AI researcher read (or more likely, skimmed) the concise summary before responding to the potential supporter? At least this line in the first paragraph, “artificial intelligence beyond some threshold level would snowball, creating a cascade of self-improvements,” doesn’t necessarily make it obvious enough that SI isn’t about “accelerating change”. (In fact, it sounds a lot like an accelerating-change-type idea.)
In my opinion at least, you need to get any potential supporter/critic to make the association between the name “Singularity Institute” and what SI actually does(/it’s goals) as soon as possible. While changing the name could do that, “Singularity Institute” has many useful aesthetic qualities that a replacement name probably won’t have.
On the other hand doing something like adding a clear tag-line about what SI does (e.g. “Pioneering safe-AI research”) to the header, would be a relatively cheap and effective solution. Perhaps rewriting the concise summary to discuss the dangers of a smarter-than-human AI before postulating the possibility of an intelligence explosion would also be effective; seeing as a smarter-than-human AI would need to be friendly, intelligence explosion or no.
It’s quite likely you can solve the problem of people miss-associating SI with “accelerating change“ without having to change names.
What if the AI researcher read (or more likely, skimmed) the concise summary before responding to the potential supporter? At least this line in the first paragraph, “artificial intelligence beyond some threshold level would snowball, creating a cascade of self-improvements,” doesn’t necessarily make it obvious enough that SI isn’t about “accelerating change”. (In fact, it sounds a lot like an accelerating-change-type idea.)
In my opinion at least, you need to get any potential supporter/critic to make the association between the name “Singularity Institute” and what SI actually does(/it’s goals) as soon as possible. While changing the name could do that, “Singularity Institute” has many useful aesthetic qualities that a replacement name probably won’t have.
On the other hand doing something like adding a clear tag-line about what SI does (e.g. “Pioneering safe-AI research”) to the header, would be a relatively cheap and effective solution. Perhaps rewriting the concise summary to discuss the dangers of a smarter-than-human AI before postulating the possibility of an intelligence explosion would also be effective; seeing as a smarter-than-human AI would need to be friendly, intelligence explosion or no.