It won't be the first prison - or anything like it.
If we have powerful intelligence that needs testing, then we can have powerful guards too.
The AI-Box experiment has human guards. Consequently, it has very low relevance to the actual problem. Programmers don't build their test harnesses out of human beings.
Safety is usually an economic trade off. You can usually have an lot of it - if you are prepared to pay for it.
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