> Sure.. but these are sci-fi scenarios. When you say "sci-fi" scenarios, what does that mean? Just something speculative about the future? Something that appe

> Sure.. but these are sci-fi scenarios. When you say "sci-fi" scenarios, what does that mean? Just something speculative about the future? Something that appeared in sci-fi media? People say this as if the fact that someone thought about a scenario that can happen and wrote a story about it has any bearing on whether it's something worth worrying about. > Also, it's somehow assumed in here that the suggested future super-intelligent AI will actually have the capability to cause catastrophic harm. I don't get where that assumption comes from. We'd have to grant such an AI some set of magical capabilities, which aren't named. Is "superintelligence" a magical ability to do anything? The way most people define "intelligence" for these purposes is "ability to achieve goals". Which would mean that, if there were any way to cause catastrophic harm, and the hypoethetical AI had as its goal creating that harm, it could do it. Is your contention that there is no way to cause catastrophic harm to humanity? Cause I think even with my regular ol' human intelligence, I can think of plenty of ways to cause harm. > Now this is speculative and, to be blunt, kind of stupid I'm not saying that Yoshua, or anyone, is above criticism. But it might be worth considering that we're talking about one of the leading academics in CS and AI. He could totally be wrong! But accusing him of saying things that are just stupid is not very convincing, IMO.