Stuart: The majority of people proposing the “bringing up baby AGI” approach to encouraging AGI ethics, are NOT making the kind of naive cognitive error you describe here. This approach to AGI ethics is not founded on naive anthropomorphism. Rather, it is based on the feeling of having a mix of intuitive and rigorous understanding of the AGI architectures in question, the ones that will be taught ethics.
For instance, my intuition is that if we taught an OpenCog system to be loving and ethical, then it would very likely be so, according to broad human standards. This intuition is NOT based on naively anthropomorphizing OpenCog systems, but rather based on my understanding of the actual OpenCog architecture (which has many significant differences from the human cognitive architecture).
No one, so far as I know, claims to have an airtight PROOF that this kind of approach to AGI ethics will work. However, the intuition that it will work is based largely on understanding of the specifics of the AGI architectures in question, not just on anthropomorphism.
If you want to counter-argue against this approach, you should argue about it in the context of the specific AGI architectures in question. Or else you should present some kind of principled counter-argument. Just claiming “anthropomorphism” isn’t very convincing.
So, are you suggesting that Robin Hanson (who is on record as not buying the Scary Idea) -- the current owner of the Overcoming Bias blog, and Eli’s former collaborator on that blog—fails to buy the Scary Idea “due to cognitive biases that are hard to overcome.” I find that a bit ironic.
Like Robin and Eli and perhaps yourself, I’ve read the heuristics and biases literature also. I’m not so naive as to make judgments about huge issues, that I think about for years of my life, based strongly on well-known cognitive biases.
It seems more plausible to me to assert that many folks who believe the Scary Idea, are having their judgment warped by plain old EMOTIONAL bias—i.e. stuff like “fear of the unknown”, and “the satisfying feeling of being part a self-congratulatory in-crowd that thinks it understands the world better than everyone else”, and the well known “addictive chemical high of righteous indignation”, etc.
Regarding your final paragraph: Is your take on the debate between Robin and Eli about “Foom” that all Robin was saying boils down to “la la la I can’t hear you” ? If so I would suggest that maybe YOU are the one with the (metaphorical) hearing problem ;p ….
I think there’s a strong argument that: “The truth value of “Once an AGI is at the level of a smart human computer scientist, hard takeoff is likely” is significantly above zero.” No assertion stronger than that seems to me to be convincingly supported by any of the arguments made on Less Wrong or Overcoming Bias or any of Eli’s prior writings.
Personally, I actually do strongly suspect that once an AGI reaches that level, a hard takeoff is extremely likely unless the AGI has been specifically inculcated with goal content working against this. But I don’t claim to have a really compelling argument for this. I think we need a way better theory of AGI before we can frame such arguments compellingly. And I think that theory is going to emerge after we’ve experimented with some AGI systems that are fairly advanced, yet well below the “smart computer scientist” level.