Is AI an existential threat to humanity? – answers by prominent AI researchers

A couple of quotes that caught my attention:

> However, keep in mind that such potential dangers are quite far from us right now. There has been a tendency in the press to blow this up out of proportion to attract attention. It could hurt AI research. Instead, we should encourage research towards better understanding these issues, to build an understanding that can, if the day comes that it becomes something more concrete to deal with, prepare us better and provide us with safer AI that respects human values.

> To match the increased power that science and technology give us, the law of the jungle is not appropriate: we need an increase in individual and collective wisdom, for our sake and that of our descendants.

Yoshua Bengio

> No, provided we stick to a simple rule: don't create AIs with goals of their own. AIs can come up with their own subgoals, but only in service of the goals we set them, and within the constraints we specify. This is how all AIs work today, and as long as they keep doing so, they can be infinitely intelligent without being a threat to us.

> Of course, human nature being what it is, sooner or later someone will try to create a self-seeking AI. To deal with that, we need what William Gibson called the "Turing police": good AIs that catch bad AIs in the same way that cops catch criminals.

Pedro Domingos