Any person insufficiently familiar with rational skepticism to the point that they would not doubt their own conclusions and go through a rigorous process of validation before reaching a "90%" certainty statement would be immune to the kind of discourse this site focuses on in the first place.
What is your certainty for this conclusion, and what rigorous process of validation did you use to arrive to it?
I'm curious as to what makes you believe this to be the case. As far as I am aware, the fundamental AgI research ongoing in the world is currently being conducted in universities.
I do not presume to know what secret research on the subject is or is not happening sponsored by governments around the world, but if any such government-sponsored work is happening in secret I consider it significantly more likely that it is uFAI, and significantly less likely that its participants would be likely to be convinced of the need for Friendliness than independent (and thus significantly more unprotected) researchers.
What is your certainty for this conclusion, and what rigorous process of validation did you use to arrive to it?
My certainty is fairly high, though of course not absolute. I base it off of my knowledge of how humans form moral convictions; how very few individuals will abandon cached moral beliefs, and the reasons I have ever encountered for individuals doing so (either through study of psychology, reports of others' studies of psychology -- including the ten years I have spent cohabitating with a student of abnormal psychology), personal observations i...
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?