Hello Effective Altruism Forum, I am Nate Soares, and I will be here to answer your questions tomorrow, Thursday the 11th of June, 15:00-18:00 US Pacific time. You can post questions here in the interim.
Last week Monday, I took the reins as executive director of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. MIRI focuses on studying technical problems of long-term AI safety. I'm happy to chat about what that means, why it's important, why we think we can make a difference now, what the open technical problems are, how we approach them, and some of my plans for the future.
I'm also happy to answer questions about my personal history and how I got here, or about personal growth and mindhacking (a subject I touch upon frequently in my blog, Minding Our Way), or about whatever else piques your curiosity. This is an AMA, after all!
EDIT (15:00): All right, I'm here. Dang there are a lot of questions! Let's get this started :-)
EDIT (18:00): Ok, that's a wrap. Thanks, everyone! Those were great questions.
(1) Eventually. Predicting the future is hard. My 90% confidence interval conditioned on no global catastrophes is maybe 5 to 80 years. That is to say, I don't know.
(2) I fairly strongly expect a fast takeoff. (Interesting aside: I was recently at a dinner full of AI scientists, some of them very skeptical about the whole long-term safety problem, who unanimously professed that they expect a fast takeoff -- I'm not sure yet how to square this with the fact that Bostrom's survey showed fast takeoff was a minority position).
It seems hard (but not impossible) to build something that's better than humans at designing AI systems & has access to its own software and new hardware, which does not self improve rapidly. Scenarios where this doesn't occur include (a) scenarios where the top AI systems are strongly hardware limited; (b) scenarios where all operators of all AI systems successfully remove all incentives to self-improve; or (c) the first AI system is strong enough to prevent all intelligence explosions, but is also constructed such that it does not itself self-improve. The first two scenarios seem unlikely from here, the third is more plausible (if the frontrunners explicitly try to achieve it) but still seems like a difficult target to hit.
(3) I think we're pretty likely to eventually get a singleton: in order to get a multi-polar outcome, you need to have a lot of systems that are roughly at the same level of ability for a long time. That seems difficult but not impossible. (For example, this is much more likely to happen if the early AGI designs are open-sourced and early AGI algorithms are incredibly inefficient such that progress is very slow and all the major players progress in lockstep.)
Remember that history is full of cases where a better way of doing things ends up taking over the world -- humans over the other animals, agriculture dominating hunting & gathering, the Brits, industrialization, etc. (Agriculture and arguably industrialization emerged separately in different places, but in both cases the associated memes still conquered the world.) One plausible outcome is that we get a series of almost-singletons that can't quite wipe out other weaker entities and therefore eventually go into decline (which is also a common pattern throughout history), but I expect superintelligent systems to be much better at "finishing the job" and securing very long-term power than, say, the Romans were. Thus, I expect a singleton outcome in the long run.
The run-up to that may look pretty strange, though.
Perhaps the first of them to voice a position on the matter expected a fast takeoff and was held in high regard by the others, so they followed along, having not previously thought about it?