There are several reasons why I wouldn't want to personally murder AI researchers, even if I believed that they were going to destroy the world (which I don't).
2.. I generally don't like killing mammals. People are some of the least cute mammals out there but it would still take an emotional toll to kill them. I'd rather outsource the killing of mammals to others.
I know both of you are speaking hypothetically, but please don't make comments that could be read as advocating murder, or that could be read as creepily cavalier about the possibility.
Here's a poser that occurred to us over the summer, and one that we couldn't really come up with any satisfactory solution to. The people who work at the Singularity Institute have a high estimate of the probability that an Unfriendly AI will destroy the world. People who work for http://nuclearrisk.org/ have a very high estimate of the probability that a nuclear war will destroy the world (by their estimates, if you are American and under 40, then nuclear war is the single most likely way in which you might die next year).
It seems like there are good reasons to take these numbers seriously, because Eliezer is probably the world expert on AI risk, and Hellman is probably the world expert on nuclear risk. However, there's a problem - Eliezer is an expert on AI risk because he believes that AI risk is a bigger risk than nuclear war. Similarly, Hellman chose to study nuclear risks and not AI risk I because he had a higher than average estimate of the threat of nuclear war.
It seems like it might be a good idea to know what the probability of each of these risks is. Is there a sensible way for these people to correct for the fact that the people studying these risks are those that have high estimate of them in the first place?