> I find it completely unbelievable that anyone who read Superintelligence could possibly assert "The Argument From My Roommate" with a straight face
Pretty sure that was a joke, and zeroing in on it is a pretty bad violation of the principle of charity. A lot of the other items in the talk (e.g. "like the alchemists, we don't even understand this well enough to have realistic goals" and "counting up all future human lives to justify your budget is a bullshit tactic" and "there's no reason to think an AI that qualifies as superintelligent by some metric will have those sorts of motives anymore") seem to me to be fair and rather important critiques of Bostrom's book. (although I was admittedly already a skeptic on this)
Pretty sure that was a joke, and zeroing in on it is a pretty bad violation of the principle of charity. A lot of the other items in the talk (e.g. "like the alchemists, we don't even understand this well enough to have realistic goals" and "counting up all future human lives to justify your budget is a bullshit tactic" and "there's no reason to think an AI that qualifies as superintelligent by some metric will have those sorts of motives anymore") seem to me to be fair and rather important critiques of Bostrom's book. (although I was admittedly already a skeptic on this)