I'm not sure I get what you're saying.
Either the creation of smarter than human intelligence is the most powerful thing in the world, or it isn't.
If it is, it would be surprising if nobody in the powerful organizations I'm talking about realizes it, especially if a few breakthroughs are made public and as we get closer to AGI.
If that is the case, this probably means that at some point AGI researchers will be "on the radar" of these people and that they should at least think about preparing for that day.
You can't have your cake and eat it too; you can't believe that AGI is the most important thing in the world and simultaneously think that it's so unimportant that nobody's going to bother with it.
I'm not saying that right now there is much danger of that . But if we can't predict when AGI is going to happen (which means wide confidence bounds, 5 years to 100 years, as Eliezer once said.), then we don't know how soon we should start thinking about security, which probably means that as soon as possible is best.
"If it is, it would be surprising if nobody in the powerful organizations I'm talking about realizes it, especially if a few breakthroughs are made public and as we get closer to AGI."
Nobody in powerful organizations realizes important things all the time. To take a case study, in 2001, Warren Buffett and Ted Turner just happened to notice that there were hundreds of nukes in Russia, sitting around in lightly guarded or unguarded facilities, which anyone with a few AK-47s and a truck could have just walked in and stolen. They had to start their o...
As promised, here is the "Q" part of the Less Wrong Video Q&A with Eliezer Yudkowsky.
The Rules
1) One question per comment (to allow voting to carry more information about people's preferences).
2) Try to be as clear and concise as possible. If your question can't be condensed to a few paragraphs, you should probably ask in a separate post. Make sure you have an actual question somewhere in there (you can bold it to make it easier to scan).
3) Eliezer hasn't been subpoenaed. He will simply ignore the questions he doesn't want to answer, even if they somehow received 3^^^3 votes.
4) If you reference certain things that are online in your question, provide a link.
5) This thread will be open to questions and votes for at least 7 days. After that, it is up to Eliezer to decide when the best time to film his answers will be. [Update: Today, November 18, marks the 7th day since this thread was posted. If you haven't already done so, now would be a good time to review the questions and vote for your favorites.]
Suggestions
Don't limit yourself to things that have been mentioned on OB/LW. I expect that this will be the majority of questions, but you shouldn't feel limited to these topics. I've always found that a wide variety of topics makes a Q&A more interesting. If you're uncertain, ask anyway and let the voting sort out the wheat from the chaff.
It's okay to attempt humor (but good luck, it's a tough crowd).
If a discussion breaks out about a question (f.ex. to ask for clarifications) and the original poster decides to modify the question, the top level comment should be updated with the modified question (make it easy to find your question, don't have the latest version buried in a long thread).
Update: Eliezer's video answers to 30 questions from this thread can be found here.