I acknowledge it as a real risk, but it's not terribly high on my personal list of things to worry about right now. I like what Andrew Ng said about how worrying about this now is "like worrying about over-population on Mars".
I'm not so confident that human-level AI will take a long time. The timeline depends on algorithmic insights, which are notoriously difficult to predict. It could be a century. It could be a decade. Still, it seems like something worth worrying about.
I never said I wasn't worried about AI. You're extrapolating from what I did say; which I've said all along was just a thought experiment, not a position I'm actually arguing for.
It's one of those books that put the arguments so clearly you're suddenly catapulted to having a vastly superior knowledge of the subject than someone trying to do simple thought experiments.
Both of your arguments look out-dated if you're one of the people 'in the know'.
Also, I suggest looking a bit more into what's going on in machine learning, it's suddenly got far more sophisticated than I personally realized until a couple of months ago when I was chatting to someone developing in it at the moment.
Ng's statement is, at best, equivalent to a student who is putting off starting their semester project until finals week. Yes it seems far away, but the future is going to happen.
"a freshman student who is putting off studying for his Senior final project until his Senior year".
The question Ng asked was something like "is there any practical action we can take today, to address over-population on mars" as an analogy to "is there any practical step we can take today to address the danger of a super-AGI". And honestly, I'm not convinced there is anything practical to do about super-AGI today. Well, nothing besides pursuing the "open AI" strategy.
But I'm willing to be convinced otherwise if somebody has a good argument.
http://futureoflife.org/data/documents/research_priorities.p...