if you want to say that a particular tech is more winner take all than usual, you need an argument based on more than just this effect. And if you want to argument it is far more so than any other tech humans have ever seen, you need a damn good additional argument.

IT is the bleeding edge of technology – and is more effective than most tech at creating inequalities – e.g. look at the list of top billionaires.

Machine intelligence is at the bleeding edge of IT. It is IT’s “killer application”. Whether its inventors will exploit its potential to provide wealth will be a matter of historical contingency – but the potential certainly looks as though it will be there. In particular, it looks as though it is likely to be mostly a server-side technology – and those are the easiest for the owners to hang on to – by preventing others from reverse-engineering the technology.

General Thinker:
A simulated human can be put in a simulated environment that is sped up right along with them. They do a year’s worth of cognitive work, and play, and sleep, in hours. They experience the full year.

Unless you plan to build an AI and immediately hook it up to all your nuclear weapons or give it free run of any and all factories for making weapons or nanotech (whatever that is nano being applied to all manner of things and now being essentially a buzz word) there is no reason to assume friendly or not an AI would destroy the world. That entire scenario is fictional, one can build an AI in an isolated computer system with little to no danger.
. . .
As long as one keeps a human in the loop with the AI and properly designs the hardware and what the hardware is connected to one can make a safe trip into “mind design space”.

Eliezer has made a very persuasive case that a “human in the loop” would not be adequate to contain a super-intelligent AI. See also his post That Alien Message. This post also addresses the point you raise when you write, “A final note there is this continued talk of 100′s or 1000′s of times human speed what does that even mean? What would thinking at a thousand times our current speed mean? How would that even work? Our thoughts and senses etc are tied closely to our sense of time. If you speed that up why would one expect that would be better? Seems to me that this would merely be like listening to music on fast-forward.”

Neither of these addresses the question of whether an artificial super-intelligence is likely to be built in the near future. But they might make you reconsider your expectation that it could be easily controlled if it was built.

To answer your direct questions, I am not suggesting forbidding speaking of anything, and if “unfriendly AI” is defined as an AI who sees itself in a total war, then sure it would take a total war strategy of fighting not trading. But you haven’t actually defined “unfriendly” yet.

Carl, I replied at your blog post, but will repeat my point here this time. You say total war doesn’t happen now because leaders are “comfortable” and humans are risk-averse with complex preferences, but there would be a total war over the solar system later because evolved machines preferences would be linear in raw materials. But evolutionary arguments don’t say we evolve to only care about raw materials, and they only suggest risk-neutrality with respect to fluctuations that are largely independent across copies that share “genes.” With respect to correlated fluctuations evolutionary arguments suggest risk-averse log utility.

A winner-take-all scenario doesn’t imply destructive combat or any sort of military conflict.

Just so. For example, in biology, genes can come to dominate completely by differential reproductive success – not just by killing all your competitors. Warfare is different from winning.

I see in this post a warning against mentioning potentially disasterous consequences to AI. This scares me. When even rationalists ought to feel ashamed of considering such possibilities then we are in trouble. Life is a powerful, dangerous thing. When we are considering creating new, potentially more powerful forms of life we need to consider how to do so without rendering ourselves extinct. The challenge is not to prove that we will not end up with a stable economically competitive non-combative equilibrium. The challenge is to look for every possibility that could lead to total war and make damn sure we’ve considered them before we touch the on switch.

Carl’s ‘Reflective Disequilibria’ post is a good one. We cannot assume conflict with or between AIs will follow the trend of human wars. The competitive superiority of ‘free men’ makes for some damn good movies and has a strong impact on human history. However, that is an ideosyncracy that a third generation em will probably not possess.

Greater computational ability doesn’t automatically lead to winning. Only if there is something worth discovering or predicting with the intelligence, another energy source or a cheaper way of doing something you need to do to survive, does it make sense to invest in compute power.