To help XiXiDu's task, we should put together a list of useful targets.

That would be great. I don't know of many AGI researchers. I am not going to ask Hugo De Garis, we know what Ben Goertzel thinks, and there already is an interview with Peter Voss that I will have to watch first.

More on Ben Goertzel:

He recently wrote 'Why an Intelligence Explosion is Probable', but with the caveat (see the comments):

Look -- what will prevent the first human-level AGIs from self-modifying in a way that will massively increase their intelligence is a very simple thing: they won't be smart enough to do that!

Every actual AGI researcher I know can see that. The only people I know who think that an early-stage, toddler-level AGI has a meaningful chance of somehow self-modifying its way up to massive superhuman intelligence -- are people associated with SIAI.

But I have never heard any remotely convincing arguments in favor of this odd, outlier view of the easiness of hard takeoff!!!

We have Brooks answer to many of these questions here - at 17:20.

Essentially, I think Brooks is wrong, robots are highly likely to take over. He only addresses the "standard scenario" of a Hollywood-style hostile robot takeover.

One big possibility he fails to address is a cooperative machine takeover, with the humans and the machines on the same side.

I agree with Brooks that consumer pressure will mostly create "good" robots in the short term. Consumer-related forces will drive the extraction of human preferences into machine-readable formats, much as we are seeing privacy-related preferences being addressed by companies today. Brooks doesn't really look into later future scenarios where forces applied by human consumers are relatively puny, though. There's eventually going to be a bit of a difference between a good company, and a company that is pretending to be good for PR reasons.

I agree with Brooks that a major accident is relatively unlikely. Brooks gives a feeble reason for thinking that, though - comparing an accident with a "lone guy" building a 747. That is indeed unlikely - but surely is only one of the possible accident scenarios.

Brooks is a robot guy. Those folk are not going to build intelligent machines first. They are typically too wedded to systems with slow build-test cycles. So Brooks may be a muddle about all this, but that doesn't seem too important: it isn't really his area.

I am not sure that you properly appreciate what happens to people when they get old. There was once a Marvin Minsky who helped write the first paper ever on "artificial intelligence". I look forward to meeting him after he comes out of cryonic suspension, but he isn't around to talk to right now.