If you would have asked people in the 70s if the most influential software of the coming decades would be written by lone wolves in their garages or a group of

If you would have asked people in the 70s if the most influential software of the coming decades would be written by lone wolves in their garages or a group of very smart people with a lot of resources, they would have bet on the latter. But the smart money turned out to be on Gates, Jobs, Wozniak and countless others. The idea of regulating AGI/SMI is based on the premise that it will be developed primarily by people who can be identified, detected and influenced by regulation. My opinion is that the odds are 50/50 at best between the very smart well resourced people and random guys or gals working in their garages, and most likely some combination of both. If that view of the world is correct it does not bode well for the success of any kind of regulation. There are people who believe that high level machine intelligence will take massive computing resources. It may, or may not. Most of the recent big advances in traditional machine learning were implemented on easy to obtain personal hardware. I hate to invoke buzz words, but even the much hyped deep learning was first developed and proven by Hinton on commodity machines. Other advances, like IBM's Watson, required 1940s style buildings full of servers. Hardware/power usage seems like one of the only reliable ways to tell who is doing any kind of serious AGI/SMI research and that looks like another 50/50 at best. It just doesn't have the resource and logistical signature of other kinds of research. AGI/SMI is still so theoretical that it can be hard to see as a clear and present danger. But if it is a real threat, it's the stuff of nightmares because there isn't anything we can do. I know people who are working on it right now. It doesn't seem like they're making a lot of progress, but they are trying and doing so completely outside the reach of any regulatory framework. I know that if I'm struck with sudden inspiration for a new approach to the problem I'm not going to ask the government for permission. I'm going to spin up 100 cloud computing instances and see if I'm right or not. And if I am, even god won't be able to help us if sama's worst case scenarios come to pass. I wrote more on this topic in a comment yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9130671 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9130671