> Surely, with so much at stake, the great minds of today are already doing this hard thinking—engaging in serious debate, weighing up the risks and benefits, s

> Surely, with so much at stake, the great minds of today are already doing this hard thinking—engaging in serious debate, weighing up the risks and benefits, seeking solutions, ferreting out loopholes in solutions, and so on. Not yet, as far as I am aware. The author is missing or ignoring key contributors of work in this field. He even mentions Nick Bostrom, who works with the FHI which does work in this space [0]. The author's own organization does work in this space [1]. Deepmind does work in this space [2]. "Safe artificial general intelligence" is the literal mission statement for OpenAI [3]. The author may feel more conversation is needed, but it feels disingenuous to suggest that nobody is talking about this. As for how much conversation should be happening, my understanding is that most people on the edge of the field view the current risks of existing artificial intelligence as significantly more pressing. We have the ability right now to create dangerous weapons & massive facial recognition programs with current AI. The longterm affects of biases in ML algorithms are still not well understood. Some of this is already affecting us [4]. When it's not clear at all how we approach general intelligence, and many experts fundamentally believe that our current approaches will not suffice ever, I'd argue the current level of focus on general intelligence safety is about where it should be. Smart people are thinking about this, but there is also important issues now to think about. [0]: https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/research/research-areas/#1513087763365-e148efe6-2d23 https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/research/research-areas/#1513087763... [1]: https://humancompatible.ai/publications https://humancompatible.ai/publications [2]: https://deepmind.com/research?filters=%7B%22tags%22:%5B%22Safety%22%5D%7D https://deepmind.com/research?filters=%7B%22tags%22:%5B%22Sa... [3]: https://openai.com/ https://openai.com/ [4]: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/14/technology/china-surveillance-artificial-intelligence-racial-profiling.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/14/technology/china-surveill...