Eliezer, I think your proposed semantics of "ought" is confusing, and doesn't match up very well with ordinary usage. May I suggest the following alternative?
ought refer's to X's would-wants if X is an individual. If X is a group, then ought is the overlap between the oughts of its members.
In ordinary conversation, when people use "ought" without an explicit subscript or possessive, the implicit X is the speaker plus the intended audience (not humanity as a whole).
ETA: The reason we use "ought" is to convince the audience to do or not do something, right? Why would we want to refer to ought, when ought would work just fine for that purpose, and ought covers a lot more ground than ought?
Robin criticizes Eliezer for not having written up his arguments about the Singularity in a standard style and submitted them for publication. Others, too, make the same complaint: the arguments involved are covered over such a huge mountain of posts that it's impossible for most outsiders to seriously evaluate them. This is a problem for both those who'd want to critique the concept, and for those who tentatively agree and would want to learn more about it.
Since it appears (do correct me if I'm wrong!) that Eliezer doesn't currently consider it worth the time and effort to do this, why not enlist the LW community in summarizing his arguments the best we can and submit them somewhere once we're done? Minds and Machines will be having a special issue on transhumanism, cognitive enhancement and AI, with a deadline for submission in January; that seems like a good opportunity for the paper. Their call for papers is asking for submissions that are around 4000 to 12 000 words.
The paper should probably
Devote the second half to discussing the question of FAI, with references to e.g. Joshua Greene's thesis and other relevant sources for establishing this argument.Carl Shulman says SIAI is already working on a separate paper on this, so it'd be better for us to concentrate merely on the FOOM aspect.I have created a wiki page for the draft version of the paper. Anyone's free to edit.