A couple serious, unbiased questions: 1) How seriously is AI safety research taken by academia? Are there grants? Academic positions? Sponsored studies etc? 2

A couple serious, unbiased questions: 1) How seriously is AI safety research taken by academia? Are there grants? Academic positions? Sponsored studies etc? 2) How much interaction is there people who study the long terms dangers of strong AI and people who look at the problems and biases of existing AI systems (say, analyzes of racial in AI bond-granting systems, etc). ... Full disclosure, I have something of a love-hate relationship with "AI safety" positions. It seems you have a series of intertwined problems. So now some biased, editorializing points. * Exactly what General AI is, what it can do and so-forth, is not known, not understood. So it's hard to either know or articulate potential dangers. Often the stand-in for this unknown is taking an AI as a god-like with an unknown agenda. This often results in contradictory and implausible worries that it's hard to take serious, so-and-so's basilisk , the "terrifying" that's Pascal's Wager warmed-over. * A primary focus of AI research is "alignment" between AIs and humans. This has the fundamental problem that humans are often not aligned with other humans. Humans don't always engage in genocidal world wars but we certainly know times when they have. AI researchers like Paul Christiano don't seem particular concerned with problem of "aligning" humans with each other but seems like a pressing question. * But let's take "AI dangers" seriously. Let's look at an analogous situation. Suppose there's a new kind of energy with the potential for massive payoff but with some kind of dangers (pollution, explosions, whatever). It's weird to say "to solve this danger, we'll create a safe form first". A rational response to some dangerous activity would be regulation for everyone creating it.