Interesting, but some of the questions aren't easy to answer.
For example if you were asking the question to someone involved in early contraception development, do you think they could of predicted what demographic/birth rate changes it would have? Similarly someone inventing a better general machine learning technique, (useful for surveillance to robot butlers) could they enumerate the variety of ways it would change the world?
For AI projects, even weak ones, I would ask how they planned to avoid the puppet problem.
The point of such "catechisms" isn't so much to have all the answers, rather to ensure that you have divided your attention evenly among a reasonable set of questions at the outset, in an effort to avoid "motivated cognition" - focusing on the thinking you find easy or pleasant to do, as opposed to the thinking that's necessary.
The idea is to improve at predicting your predictable failures. If this kind of thinking turns up a thorny question you don't know how to answer, you can lay the current project aside until you have solved the th...
The Open Thread posted at the beginning of the month has gotten really, really big, so I've gone ahead and made another one. Post your new discussions here!
This thread is for the discussion of Less Wrong topics that have not appeared in recent posts. If a discussion gets unwieldy, celebrate by turning it into a top-level post.