THW: ban the development of artificial superintelligences (ASIs)

You claim that there is no such thing as a non sentient AI. Yet you have several times during this debate brought up what I would call non sentient AIs and called them AI. For example, in the first round you talk of a chess AI. There are many of these, I can download one as an app on my phone. No one would dispute the fact that a chess AI is an AI, it even fulfils your definition of an AI. It has logical and reasoning abilities when it comes to chess. But it is in no way sentient. It can analyse parameters and feed out a result, but it does not think. It isn't self aware and does not identify itself as an individual. It's just a program that can play chess. Now to the space travel point. "A human programmer can program exactly what they want a spaceship to do without the need for AI, before the spaceship is launched." That is what I would call an AI. It has enough "logical and reasoning abilities" to pilot a space ship. And just to humour my opponent, even if the program weren't an AI, how would it differ if something went wrong with the program compared to the AI. They would both require the exact same amount of time to send an error report, which makes this point even more ridiculous. My concession that sentient AI could be scary was in context of the rest of the paragraph, which clarified that careless use of sentient AI could be scary, which is why I advised tight regulation, but not banning, of the AI. Your suggestion that a computing singularity isn't at all beyond today's technology is completely false. That would require an AI that is capable of programming. Just try to use Eclipse or any other IDE (integrated development environment) and tell me how amazing the programming skills of computers are. Whenever I code in Eclipse or Intellij's Idea I get stupid error warnings on lines of code I haven't finished yet. If an IDE isn't even able to distinguish a finished line from code to an unfinished one, how on earth is a program supposed to code a better version of itself? Now I won't disagree with you that a potential sentient AI would be very sophisticated. But claiming that it could hack it's way out of a computer which has no internal wifi card or something similar is just dumb. It's like saying "if I enter this line of code into my toaster it'll be able to do laundry". The only way hacking could physically affect hardware is to overheat it, which would basically result in the AI committing suicide. Otherwise there is no possibility for an AI to modify its hardware by manipulating the software. Software can not affect the hardware it is contained in, nor will it ever be able to do so because that's not how software works. And lastly we have the manipulating humans argument. I can agree with you that there are a lot of amusing movies and TV shows where manipulating humans into doing things against there will. But in reality I'd say it's nigh on impossible to make a fully sane human go against their self interest without some leverage. And since the sentient AI is stuck in a box, I doubt there is any way for it to gain leverage over a human. In conclusion, I can not see any downside with non sentient AI. It has many uses, it is efficient and it is harmless because it does not have the ability to stray from it's task. Sentient AI on the other hand could become a problem if not handled properly, which is why I would call for certain regulations against their use. But I would not consider banning them. I would argue that their usefulness would outweigh their potential danger if handled improperly and should therefore be allowed.