That may well be the case, but it's still worth thinking about longer-term risks. If it takes, say, forty years to get to AGI, then it's still pretty sobering t

That may well be the case, but it's still worth thinking about longer-term risks. If it takes, say, forty years to get to AGI, then it's still pretty sobering to consider a serious threat of extinction, just forty years away. Most of the arguments over what's worth worrying about are people talking past each other, because one side worries about short-term risks and the other side is more focused on the long term. Another conflict may be between people making linear projections, and those making exponential ones. Whether full self-driving happens next year or in 2050, it will probably still look pretty far away, when it's really just a year or two from exceeding human capabilities. When it's also hard to know exactly how difficult the problem is, there's a good chance that these great leaps will take us by surprise.