Ok, I'll bite. Can you list several things that are vastly more likely to lead to the complete extinction of the human race (I'll assume that's what you meant by "destroy humanity") than malicious AGI?
That's what keeps me up at night these days.
Climate change and nuclear war are huge issues, and we correctly invest orders of magnitude more money and time (which might still not be enough) trying to prevent or limit these than trying to prevent the birth of a malicious AGI, but they are extremely unlikely to lead to a complete extinction of the human race.
Regarding the other scenarios, if you allow me to move the goalposts from pure risk assessment:
- Preparing against an alien invasion seems futile, since given the timescales at play in the universe, the first aliens we meet will likely be millions of years behind or ahead of us.
- One way to survive an asteroid impact is to colonize another planet ahead of time, which Musk is working on.
- Physics experiments requiring specialized hardware like the LHC already have much more oversight than AI research where a breakthough could potentially happen in a garage on commodity hardware.
So it makes a lot of sense to me to invest some money in preventing an AI doomsday scenario next.
Nobody is arguing against funding AI. It's the fear-mongering we disagree with. It harms the field.
- Superbug pandemic
- Supervolcano eruption