I first became interested in AI risk back around 2007. At the time, most people’s response to the topic was “Haha, come back when anyone believes this besides random Internet crackpots.”

Over the next few years, a series of extremely bright and influential figures including Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking, and Elon Musk publically announced they were concerned about AI risk, along with hundreds of other intellectuals, from Oxford philosophers to MIT cosmologists to Silicon Valley tech investors. So we came back.

Then the response changed to “Sure, a couple of random academics and businesspeople might believe this stuff, but never real experts in the field who know what’s going on.”

Thus pieces like Popular Science’s Bill Gates Fears AI, But AI Researchers Know Better:

When you talk to A.I. researchers—again, genuine A.I. researchers, people who grapple with making systems that work at all, much less work too well—they are not worried about superintelligence sneaking up on them, now or in the future. Contrary to the spooky stories that Musk seems intent on telling, A.I. researchers aren’t frantically installed firewalled summoning chambers and self-destruct countdowns.

And Fusion.net’s The Case Against Killer Robots From A Guy Actually Building AI:

Andrew Ng builds artificial intelligence systems for a living. He taught AI at Stanford, built AI at Google, and then moved to the Chinese search engine giant, Baidu, to continue his work at the forefront of applying artificial intelligence to real-world problems. So when he hears people like Elon Musk or Stephen Hawking—people who are not intimately familiar with today’s technologies—talking about the wild potential for artificial intelligence to, say, wipe out the human race, you can practically hear him facepalming.

And now Ramez Naam of Marginal Revolution is trying the same thing with What Do AI Researchers Think Of The Risk Of AI?:

Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and Bill Gates have recently expressed concern that development of AI could lead to a ‘killer AI’ scenario, and potentially to the extinction of humanity. None of them are AI researchers or have worked substantially with AI that I know of. What do actual AI researchers think of the risks of AI?

It quotes the same couple of cherry-picked AI researchers as all the other stories – Andrew Ng, Yann LeCun,...

Futurism and Forecasting

Interlude