The idiot savant AI isn't an idiot

Yes, but the focus is on an already competent AI. It would never willingly or knowingly change its goals from its original ones, given that it improves itself smartly, and was initially programmed with (at least) that level of reflective smartness.

Goals are static. The AI may refine its goals given the appropriate information, if its goals are programmed in such a way to allow it, but it wont drastically alter them in any functional way.

An appropriate metaphor would be physics. The laws of physics are the same, and have been the same since the creation of the universe. Our information about what they are, however, hasn't been. Isaac newton had a working model of physics, but it wasn't perfect. It let us get the right answer (mostly), but then Einstein discovered Relativity. (The important thing to remember here is that physics itself did not change.) All the experiments used to support Newtonian physics got the same amount of support from Relativity. Relativity, however, got much more accurate answers for more extreme phenomena unexplained by Newton.

The AI can be programmed with Newton, and do good enough. However, given the explicit understanding of how we got to Newton in the first place (i.e. the scientific method), it can upgrade itself to Relativity when it realizes we were a bit off. That should be the extent to which an AI purposefully alters its goal.

Long before goal mutation is a problem malformed constraints become a problem. Consider a thought experiment: Someone offers to pay you 100 dollars when a wheelbarrow is full of water from a nearby lake, and provides you with the wheelbarrow and a teaspoon. Before you have to worry about people deciding they don't care about 100 dollars, you need to decide how to keep them from just pushing the wheelbarrow into the lake.

My understanding was that this was about whether the singularity was "AI going beyond "following its programming"," with goal-modification being an example of how an AI might go beyond its programming.

I have a feeling that in this context "intelligent" is defined as "maximizing utility".

Pretty much.

If you just want to create a virtuous AI for some sort of deontological reason, then it being less intelligent isn't a problem. If you want to get things done, then it is. The AI being subject to dutch book betting only helps you insomuch as the AI's goals differ from yours and you don't want it to be successful.

And what is an "adaptation-executer"?

See Adaptation-Executors, not Fitness-Maximizers.

For example, "We need to decide whether that AI is intelligent enough to just let it loose exploring this planet" implies a different definition of "intelligent" compared to, say, "We need to decide whether that AI is intelligent enough to be trusted with a laser cutter".

Those sound more like safety concerns than inquiries involving intelligence. Being clever and able to get things done doesn't automatically make something share enough of your values to be friendly and useful.

Better questions would be "We need to decide whether that AI is intelligent enough to effectively research and come to conclusions about the world if we let it explore without restrictions" or "We need to decide if the AI is intelligent enough to correctly use a laser cutter".

Although, given large power (i.e. a laser cutter) and low intelligence, it might not achieve even its explicate goal correctly, and may accidentally do something bad. (i.e. laser cut a person)

one attribute of intelligence is the likelihood of said AI producing bad results non-purposefully. The more it does, the less intelligent it is.

Ok. As I pointed out elsewhere, "AI" around here usually refers to the class of well-designed programs. A badly-programmed AI can obviously change its goals; if it does so, however, then by construction it is not good at achieving whatever the original goals were. Moreover,no matter what its starting goals are, it is really extremely unlikely to arrive at ones we would like by moving around in goal space, unless it is specifically designed, and well designed, to do so. "Human terminal values" is not an attractor in goal space. The paperclip maximiser is really much more likely than the human-happiness maximiser, on the obvious grounds that paperclips are much simpler than human happiness; but an iron-atoms maximiser is more likely still. The point is that you cannot rely on the supposed "obviousness" of morality to get your AI to self-modify into a desirable state; it's only obvious to humans.

you're resorting to insults & I've barely engaged with you, so I'm going to ignore you from here on out.

If you had to guess, would you say you're probably ignoring Rolf to protect your epistemically null feelings, or to protect your epistemology? (In terms of the actual cognitive mechanism causally responsible for your avoidance, not primarily in terms of your explicit linguistic reason.)

I would gather we have much more certainty about Deep Blue's algorithms considering that we built them.

And you'd gather wrong. Our confidence that the woman says "hello" (and a fortiori our confidence that she does not take a gun and blow the man's head off) exceeds our confidence that Deep Blue will make a particular chess move in response to most common plays by several couple orders of magnitude.

You're getting into hypothetical territory assuming that we can obtain near perfect knowledge of the human brain & that the neural state is all we need to predict future human behavior.

We started off well into hypothetical territory, back when Stuart brought Clippy into his thought experiment. Within that territory, I'm trying to steer us away from the shoals of irrelevance by countering your hypothetical ('but what if [insert unlikely scenario here]? see, humans can't be predicted sometimes! therefore they are Unpredictable!') with another hypothetical. But all of this still leaves us within sight of the shoals.

You're missing the point, which is not that humans are perfectly predictable by other humans to arbitrarily high precision and in arbitrarily contrived scenarios, but that our evolved intuitions are vastly less reliable when predicting AI conduct from an armchair than when predicting human conduct from an armchair. That, and our explicit scientific knowledge of cognitive algorithms is too limited to get us very far with any complex agent. The best we could do is build a second Deep Blue to simulate the behavior of the first Deep Blue.