THW: ban the development of artificial superintelligences (ASIs)

My argument essentially boils down to the following: 1) ASIs are extremely likely to be dangerous. 2) ASIs are not necessary. 3) Developing a safe ASI is a very inefficient way of solving a problem. Firstly, the way any AI (superintelligent or otherwise) works is that it has a utility function- that is, it has some criteria by which it measures the world, and acts such that it maximises the score it gives the world on its utility function. One example of a utility function, for instance, is "+1 for every cake consumed in my bakery". This seems fine at first, but any utility function can lead AIs to behave in unpredictable ways. For instance, the AI may realise that humans have to eat, and therefore if it kidnaps some humans and holds them hostage in the bakery, more cakes will be eaten in the bakery, and it will do so. Though AIs may be programmed such that they avoid specific behaviours (such as kidnapping people) by giving those behaviours a negative score on the utility function, it is essentially impossible to list absolutely every way in which you don't want the AI to behave, and it is extremely unpredictable, so you don't know which behaviours you need to tell it not to do. ASIs will also try (and succeed- they're smarter than you) to stop you from modifying them in any way- whatever their utility function is, having their utility function changed is necessarily going to rate low on its utility function. For instance, the bakery ASI would realise it will be less efficient at making people eat cakes if you try and update its code such that it won't kidnap people, and therefore it will resist your attempts to do so. So, ASIs are dangerous in that they are unpredictable and will likely take actions without regard for the kinds of things we are concerned with, and likewise they will resist any attempts to change their utility function, and therefore to improve them and make them safer. ASIs are also unnecessary- there is nothing that can be accomplished by a superintelligent computer system that couldn't be accomplished by an intelligent human who is in control of a powerful, but non-intelligent, computer program. Con may (and should, if they want to argue why we should allow ASIs to be developed) argue that some such task does exist, but should they fail to do so, the natural conclusion is that ASIs are not necessary, and therefore we should not make them. Building an ASI such that it can solve a specific problem is an extremely inefficient way of solving the problem- you would be much better off "cutting out the middleman" and using the time spent developing the ASI to instead solve the problem yourself. One example of this is in chess- you would win a lot more chess games a lot more quickly by leaning how to be good at chess yourself and then playing it yourself, than to learn how to play chess and then code an ASI such that it can play chess as well as you could have. The same goes for absolutely any problem; it's a lot more efficient to learn how to solve the problem yourself than to code a system which is capable of solving the problem. So, in short, ASIs are dangerous, unpredictable, unnecessary and ineffective. For that reason, I urge the reader to side with the proposition of this motion and to ban the use development of ASIs.