Ah, OK. In that sense, I believe at least 90% of the world's
population is loony, because they believe in God -- which is a far
more fanciful and less probable notion than De Garis's "artilect war"
;-O
Heh, we have different assessments of the relative rationality of these theories... but I draw a distinction between:
1) "There is a God, somewhere outside the world we know" / "Superintelligent AI will exist someday",
and
2) views like those of de Garis or the most extreme of the "Judgement is coming!" religious fundamentalists or the "pole shift" cult that were around a few years ago (one of whom said in an online discussion with fellow cultists something unusually insightful: "We are united by our hatred of the current world order" - quote from memory, but that was the gist of it).
I reserve "loony" for the second category. The thing is that unlike the pole shift crowd, people like de Garis (and Eliezer, though I don't call him a loony because I think his motives are better - the result may be the same though) may be truly dangerous - not of course because their computers are really going to conquer the world, but because they're poisoning the meme pool, doing the luddites' work - making it that much more likely that the world will turn away from progress and Earth-descended life decline to extinction.
And, I don't think you're trying very hard to understand how such a
war could viably come about.
I think it doesn't stand up to even a cursory glance, let alone deep analysis.
Looking at the political situation in the world today, regarding
weapons of mass destruction and nuclear proliferation and so forth, I
don't find this kind of scenario all that farfetched --- if one
assumes a soft takeoff...
But nothing like your scenario has ever come close to occurring. No First World nation has ever seriously threatened to attack another over development of technology. What's happened is that there have been attacks or threats thereof on Third World nations - not over development of new technology, of which the sort of country likely to be a target is quite incapable, but over acquisition of existing technology which is already well proven and whose existence is not in question; the only controversial issue is whether some nasty totalitarian regime should be allowed to join the major powers in possessing it. This can result in violence to be sure, but it's a completely different thing from the "Cosmists vs Terrans" fantasy.
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