This is not a long post, but I wanted to draw attention to Wikipedia's list of notable machine learning researchers, because it has done so much for me. For anyone interested in problems related to AI (to get a feel for what AI is like), I recommend reading at least the Wikipedia page of each of those people, followed by playing around on their professional home page (just put their name into Google). You will soon be overwhelmed, but that is to be expected unless you have a PhD in statistics or machine learning. (And believe me, it is much less overwhelming than delving into my world of pure math, for example!)

Nevertheless, you will run into many insightful things, such as Steve Omohundro's (who is an advisor to SIAI) Self-Aware Systems, and Ghahramani's list of topics for a qualifying exam on machine learning. I also recommend skimming the bibliographies of the research articles for those researchers who post PDFs on their webpages as to get a familiarity for what journals and foundational papers/books are important. (And coming back here to post that information!)

Know these names. When Eliezer uses the words "the programmers of Friendly AI," there is a significantly higher probability than the average person that these names have something to do with that (future graduate students, or otherwise intellectual descendants). If you are yourself a researcher in machine learning, ethics, or statistics, it would be helpful if you could post any names not listed in the above Wikipedia category. Their homepages have utility for us.

Incidentally, I recommend working through The Elements of Statistical Learning by Hastie, Tibshirani, and Friedman, where a lot of these ideas are gathered into one (certainly not comprehensive) treatise.

As a related question, is there an equivalent to the unbelievably helpful MathSciNet for other domains? (Where there are reviews of papers available as well as hyperlinks to the database entry for citations as to determine what important papers and books in the field are, etc.)

One final remark: Under Crocker's Rules, please give me suggestions how to rephrase the above sentences to have less parentheses. I am much too fond of them.