Robotics progress is a lot slower than progress in disembodied AI, and disembodied AI trying to kill humanity is like naked John von Neumann trying to kill a ti

Robotics progress is a lot slower than progress in disembodied AI, and disembodied AI trying to kill humanity is like naked John von Neumann trying to kill a tiger in an arena. IMO we need to figure out AI safety before physically embodied AI (smart robots) becomes routine, but to me safety in that context looks more like traditional safety-critical and security-critical software development. I'm aware of the argument that smart enough AI can rapidly bootstrap itself to catastrophically affect the material world: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Aq82XqYhgqdPdPrBA/full-transcript-eliezer-yudkowsky-on-the-bankless-podcast https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Aq82XqYhgqdPdPrBA/full-trans... "It gets an immense technological advantage. If it's smart, it doesn't announce itself. It doesn't tell you that there's a fight going on. It emails out some instructions to one of those labs that'll synthesize DNA and synthesize proteins from the DNA and get some proteins mailed to a hapless human somewhere who gets paid a bunch of money to mix together some stuff they got in the mail in a file. Like, smart people will not do this for any sum of money. Many people are not smart. Builds the ribosome, but the ribosome that builds things out of covalently bonded diamondoid instead of proteins folding up and held together by Van der Waals forces, builds tiny diamondoid bacteria. The diamondoid bacteria replicate using atmospheric carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and sunlight. And a couple of days later, everybody on earth falls over dead in the same second." As someone with a strong background in chemistry this just makes me skeptical of Yudkowsky's groundedness as a prognosticator. Biological life is not compatible with known synthesis conditions for diamond, and even superintelligence may not discover workarounds. I am even more skeptical that AI can make such advances and turn them into working devices purely by pondering/simulation, i.e. without iterative laboratory experiments.