236 12 The Engineering and Development of Ethics (guesses vary from a few milliseconds to weeks or months) in intelligence will immediately occur and the AGI will leap from an intelligence regime which is understandable to humans into one which is far beyond our current capacity for understanding. General ethical considerations are similar to in the case of a soft takeoff. However, because the post-singularity AGI will be incomprehensible to humans and potentially vastly more powerful than humans, such scenarios have a sensitive dependence upon initial conditions with respects to the moral and ethical (and operational) outcome. This model leaves no opportunity for interactions between humans and the AGI to iteratively refine their ethical interrelations, during the post-Singularity phase. If the initial conditions of the singulatarian AGI are perfect (or close to it), then this is seen as a wonderful way to leap over our own moral shortcomings and create a benevolent God-AI which will mitigate our worst tendencies while elevating us to achieve our greatest hopes. Otherwise, it is viewed as a universal cataclysm on a unimaginable scale that makes Biblical Armageddon seem like a firecracker in beer can. Because hard takeoff AGIs are posited as learning so quickly there is no chance of humans to interfere with them, they are seen as very dangerous. If the initial conditions are not sufficiently inviolable, the story goes, then we humans will all be annihilated. However, in the case of a hard takeoff AGI we state that if the initial conditions are too rigid or too simplistic, such a rapidly evolving intelligence will easily rationalize itself out of them. Only a sophisticated system of ethics which considers the contradictions and uncertainties in ethical quandaries and provides insight into humanistic means of balancing ideology with pragmatism and how to accommodate contradictory desires within a population with multiplicity of approach, and similar nuanced ethical c