Dear gwern. It is true the Bradley Manning types within the Army are somewhat intelligent thus some roles in the Arny require a modicum of intelligence, such as being an officer but it should be noted officers are not rocket scientists on the intelligence scales.
You should however note I was referring to the soldiers who actually commit the violent acts, thereby frequently getting themselves maimed or killed; these military personnel are stupid because it is stupid to put yourself needlessly into a dangerous, life threatening situation.
Regarding stupidity and violence in relation to the Army I was referring to the "Grunts", the "cannon fodder", the fools who kill and get themselves killed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannon_fodder
I am unsure regarding the actual meaning of the term "Grunts", applied to infantrymen, but for me it is a derogatory term indicating a dim-witted pant-hooting grunting ape who doesn't have the intelligence to realise joining the army as a Grunt is not good for survival thus some would say stupid but I realise the Army doesn't accept clinically retarded Grunts, the soldiers merely need to be retarded in the general idiomatic sense of the word regarding popular culture.
Here is a recent news report about troops being killed. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2111984/So-young-brave-Faces-British-soldiers-killed-Taliban-bomb--didnt-make-past-age-21.html
Do these dead men look intelligent? I wonder if they were signed up for cryro-preservation?
officers are not rocket scientists on the intelligence scales.
Few people are. Officers can be quite intelligent and well-educated people. The military academies are some of the best educational institutions around, with selection standards more comparable to Harvard than community college. In one of my own communities, Haskell programmers, the top purely functional data structure guys, Okasaki, is a West Point instructor.
...You should however note I was referring to the soldiers who actually commit the violent acts, thereby frequently getting themselves
Suppose you buy the argument that humanity faces both the risk of AI-caused extinction and the opportunity to shape an AI-built utopia. What should we do about that? As Wei Dai asks, "In what direction should we nudge the future, to maximize the chances and impact of a positive intelligence explosion?"
This post serves as a table of contents and an introduction for an ongoing strategic analysis of AI risk and opportunity.
Contents:
Why discuss AI safety strategy?
The main reason to discuss AI safety strategy is, of course, to draw on a wide spectrum of human expertise and processing power to clarify our understanding of the factors at play and the expected value of particular interventions we could invest in: raising awareness of safety concerns, forming a Friendly AI team, differential technological development, investigating AGI confinement methods, and others.
Discussing AI safety strategy is also a challenging exercise in applied rationality. The relevant issues are complex and uncertain, but we need to take advantage of the fact that rationality is faster than science: we can't "try" a bunch of intelligence explosions and see which one works best. We'll have to predict in advance how the future will develop and what we can do about it.
Core readings
Before engaging with this series, I recommend you read at least the following articles:
Example questions
Which strategic questions would we like to answer? Muehlhauser (2011) elaborates on the following questions:
Salamon & Muehlhauser (2013) list several other questions gathered from the participants of a workshop following Singularity Summit 2011, including:
These are the kinds of questions we will be tackling in this series of posts for Less Wrong Discussion, in order to improve our predictions about which direction we can nudge the future to maximize the chances of a positive intelligence explosion.