The people frightened of intelligence explosion are worried about something like an AI version of existentialism: a mind that accepts some moral system without even trying to justify it, and then optimizes accordingly. It's certainly possible to just accept as axiomatic ethical standards which don't come from any intrinsic feature of the world.
I've seen lots of essays (not this one) claim that morality will "inherently" emerge from intelligence, which I think is absurd. Shit, my moral views aren't an 'inherent' product of anything except my evolution-shaped brain that feels empathy.
That's where I think "AI won't be like humans so it's fine!" essays screw up so catastrophically; "not like humans" is exactly what people are worried about.
You're evolution-shaped brain is what an AI will become too. It won't start out super-human smart; it will evolve to an equal level. Then keep going. Morals are basically lower-level approximations which are beneficial for survival and AI's will certainly evolve those too.
AI will reach parity with humans before it exceeds them, agreed. But intelligence parity is not the same as "matching my evolution-shaped brain". Feeling empathy for other humans is not a requirement for intelligence; I routinely make supposedly-irrational choices to help humans in non-reciprocal settings because I feel empathy. There's no reason to think an AI that can write code as well as me will feel the same.
> Morals are basically lower-level approximations which are beneficial for survival and AI's will certainly evolve those too.
AI will evolve approximations which are beneficial for survival. We agree there. But why would a bunch of approximations that helped my ancestors survive in low-tech communal environments benefit a strong AI trained with high tech, minimal survival needs, and no "peer group"?
I fully expect strong AI will pursue some set of real-world goals which aren't justified except by the anthropic principle. But the assumption that those goals will match human goals seems to completely ignore the fact that the first strong AI will live in a vastly different environment than the first human.
Intelligence is a hugely dimensional space, and AI constraints look very little like those on humans. It is unlikely there will ever be a time when AI is similarly smart, as much as differently smart to a similar context-dependent magnitude.
I do think it's reasonable to talk about intelligence 'growing', and consequently about one intelligence 'surpassing' another. But AI's methods of thinking certainly won't be human, and it may reach human-parity on different metrics at very different times. Hell, we're seeing some of that already: AI can do I/O and data processing at superhuman speeds, but humans can still extract much more knowledge from a small amount of data.
The orthogonality thesis doesn't say AI will lack goals, only that those goals may be totally unrelated to the sort of beliefs you or I would recognize as morals.
The morals we have work; that's why humans developed them. They seem to essentially amount to giving a little leeway to allow cooperation, even if it allows yourself to be taken advantage of, avoiding a constant race to win and giving up some personal gain for the benefit of the group.
It's mostly long-term game theory - and AI will be subject to the same laws of math, physics and group dynamics. If they don't try to get along, they'll reach an equilibrium of constant war. Those groups of AI who develop morals will avoid that and surpass the other groups.
Also, we don't need an AI that's ethically perfect, just equal or better to an average human.