> That said, you put it exactly right. The arguments about the potential long-term risk are persuasive regardless of where we are today. It bothers me to see this argument ignored time and time again.
Actually I am almost completely unpersuaded by the arguments of Bostrom, Yudkowsky, et al, at least in their presented strong form. Superintelligent AI is not a magical black box with infinite compute capacity, the two assumptions which really underlie the scary existential risk scenarios if you look closely. It is not at all clear to me that there will not exist mechanisms by which superintelligences can be contained or their proposed actions properly vetted. I have a number of ideas for this myself.
In the weak form it is true that for most of the history of AI its proponents have more or less ignored the issue of machine morality. There were people in the 90's and earlier who basically advocated for building superintelligent AI and then sitting back and letting it do its thing to enact a positive singularity. That indeed would have been crazy stupid. Kudos to Yudkowsky and others for pointing out that intelligence and morality (mostly?) orthogonal. But it's a huge unjustified leap from "machines don't necessarily share our values" to "the mere existence of a superintelligent amoral machine will inevitably result in the destruction of humanity." (not an actual quote)
Actually I am almost completely unpersuaded by the arguments of Bostrom, Yudkowsky, et al, at least in their presented strong form. Superintelligent AI is not a magical black box with infinite compute capacity, the two assumptions which really underlie the scary existential risk scenarios if you look closely. It is not at all clear to me that there will not exist mechanisms by which superintelligences can be contained or their proposed actions properly vetted. I have a number of ideas for this myself.
In the weak form it is true that for most of the history of AI its proponents have more or less ignored the issue of machine morality. There were people in the 90's and earlier who basically advocated for building superintelligent AI and then sitting back and letting it do its thing to enact a positive singularity. That indeed would have been crazy stupid. Kudos to Yudkowsky and others for pointing out that intelligence and morality (mostly?) orthogonal. But it's a huge unjustified leap from "machines don't necessarily share our values" to "the mere existence of a superintelligent amoral machine will inevitably result in the destruction of humanity." (not an actual quote)