The Yudkowsky Ambition Scale

6) "Good. I already planned to become God if possible. Now I have an existence proof."

3) "Just because God exists, doesn't mean that I should worship him. In fact, if Hell exists then God is really evil, and I should put all my effort into killing God and rescuing everyone from hell. Sure it sounds impossible, but I wouldn't give up until I'd thought about the problem and tried all possible courses of action."

But if you succeed in pulling everyone from hell, what would give their existences meaning and purpose? I mean, you just can't thwart god's sovereign will for his creatures without consequences. God created them for damnation as their telos from the very beginning, just as he created others to receive totally undeserved salvation.

4) "God is massively powerful. Sure I'd kill him if I had to, but that would be a catastrophic waste. My true aim would be to harness God's power and use it to do good."

In other words, you want to convert god into a Krell Machine that works properly?

Quoting Michael Vassar and myself; I think we independently thought it.

https://twitter.com/nicktarleton/status/115615378188668928

Since it's basically a log scale in terms of outcomes, the T-shirt store might be a 0.

-10 would be "I will make a generic post on LW."

It would be a fun exercise to flesh out the negative side of the scale.

Nah.

11 We think we've figured out how to hack into the computer ALL the universes are running on.

To be fair, if 1% of people think they can found a company that defines the way more than 10% of humans relate to each other for several years, 99.9999% of them are vastly overconfident.

If you ignore the credit rating system, and replace its hash algorithm with variable-length (expanding) one, that's basically what Bitcoin is. (Inversion of variable-length collision-resistant hash functions is NP-hard. I had to ask on that one.)

[EDIT: That question has been dead for a while, but now that I posted a link, it got another answer which basically repeats the first answer and needlessly retreads why I had to rephrase the question in a way such that the hash inversion problem has a variable size so that asymptotic difficulty becomes meaningful, thus being non-responsive to the question as now phrased. I hope it wasn't someone from here that clicked that link.]

They've made a lot of progress getting games to derive protein-folding results, but I think there's a lot of room for improvement there (better fidelity to the laws of the protein folding environment so players can develop an "intuition" of what shapes work, semiotics that are more suggestive of the dynamics of their subsystems, etc).

I trust you've looked into Ripple? It strikes me as fairly interesting, though the implementation is, at present, uninspiring.

I've been musing about the same sort of proof-of-work algorithm, but I haven't come up with a good actual system yet - there's no obvious way to decentralizedly get a guaranteed-hard new useful problem.

2 has been done many times in human history (for some reasonably definition of what companies count as "previous Apples"). 9 has never been done. Why do you think 9 is no harder than 2, assuming it is possible?

I think, given how many millions of minds it would have to affect and how much sanity increase it would require, it sounds a lot like 6 in practice. (Unless the approach is "Build a company big enough to buy Google, and then limit comments to people who are sane", in which case, 2.)

Level 6 seems like it could include both language and writing. For stuff beyond that, I think you have to look at accomplishments by non-human entities. Bacteria would seem to count for level 7, humans for 8 and possibly 9 (TBD).

I would put it lower than 9 because a general AI is science as software. Which means it is already contained in 9.

10 (hacking the physics of the universe), 11 (hacking the source of the computational power running the universe, if applicable), or 12 (gaining access to literally infinite computing power i.e. becoming a god) seem to be the highest you can go. How would you propose getting past 12?

Will Newsome is somewhere between Eliezer and a recursively self-improving AI.