Some people say that artificial general intelligence is too far away for us to start worrying about. But, the thing is, we’ve had nukes for 75 years and we still haven’t quite figured out what to do about them. If an oracle had come and told us that one day our understanding of atoms would give us the power to destroy the world, how early do you think we should have started to prepare? Well, the empirical answer is that 75 years and counting wasn’t enough. I’m not even confident that we would be ready if we’d been given a thousand years.
Some people say that artificial general intelligence is too far away for us to start worrying about. But, the thing is, we’ve had nukes for 75 years and we still haven’t quite figured out what to do about them. If an oracle had come and told us that one day our understanding of atoms would give us the power to destroy the world, how early do you think we should have started to prepare? Well, the empirical answer is that 75 years and counting wasn’t enough. I’m not even confident that we would be ready if we’d been given a thousand years.