Further, why do you think does everyone I asked about the issue either disagree or continue to ignore the issue and work on AI?
Because people always do this with large scale existential risks, especially ones that sound fringe. Why were there so few papers published on Nuclear Winter? What proportion of money was set aside for tracking near-earth objects as opposed to, say, extra police to handle murder investigations? Why is the World Health Organisations's budget 0.006% of world GDP (with the CDC only twice as large)? Why are the safety requirements playing catch-up with the dramatic progress in synthetic biology?
I have my doubts that if I would have written the relevant researchers about nuclear winter they would have told me that it is a fringe issue. Probably a lot would have told me that they can't write about it in the midst of the cold war.
I also have my doubts that biologists would tell me that they think that the issue of risks from synthetic biology is just bunkers. Although quite a few would probably tell me that the risks are exaggerated.
Regarding the murder vs. asteroid funding. I am not sure that it was very irrational, in retrospect, to avoid asteroid funding until now. The additional amount of resources it would have taken to scan for asteroids a few decades ago versus now might outweigh the few decades in which nobody looked for possible asteroids on a collision course with earth. But I don't have any data to back this up.
One of the most annoying arguments when discussing AI is the perennial "But if the AI is so smart, why won't it figure out the right thing to do anyway?" It's often the ultimate curiosity stopper.
Nick Bostrom has defined the "Orthogonality thesis" as the principle that motivation and intelligence are essentially unrelated: superintelligences can have nearly any type of motivation (at least, nearly any utility function-bases motivation). We're trying to get some rigorous papers out so that when that question comes up, we can point people to standard, and published, arguments. Nick has had a paper accepted that points out the orthogonality thesis is compatible with a lot of philosophical positions that would seem to contradict it.
I'm hoping to complement this with a paper laying out the positive arguments in favour of the thesis. So I'm asking you for your strongest arguments for (or against) the orthogonality thesis. Think of trying to convince a conservative philosopher who's caught a bad case of moral realism - what would you say to them?
Many thanks! Karma and acknowledgements will shower on the best suggestions, and many puppies will be happy.