I'm going to throw out some more questions. You are by no means obligated to answer.
In your AI Safety Engineering paper you say, "We propose that AI research review boards are set up, similar to those employed in review of medical research proposals. A team of experts in artificial intelligence should evaluate each research proposal and decide if the proposal falls under the standard AI – limited domain system or may potentially lead to the development of a full blown AGI."
But would we really want to do this today? I mean, in the near future--say the next five years--AGI seems pretty hard to imagine. So might this be unnecessary?
Or, what if later on when AGI could happen, some random country throws the rules out? Do you think that promoting global cooperation now is a useful way to address this problem, as I assert in this shamelessly self-promoted blog post?
The general question I am after is, How do we balance the risks and benefits of AI research?
Finally you say in your interview, "Conceivable yes, desirable NO" on the question of relinquishment. But are you not essentially proposing relinquishment/prevention?
Just because you can’t imaging AGI in the next 5 years, doesn’t mean that in four years someone will not propose a perfectly workable algorithm for achieving it. So yes, it is necessary. Once everyone sees how obvious AGI design is, it will be too late. Random countries don’t develop cutting edge technology; it is always done by the same Superpowers (USA, Russia, etc.). I didn’t read your blog post so can’t comment on “global cooperation”. As to the general question you are asking, you can get most conceivable benefits from domain expert AI without any need for AGI. Finally, I do think that relinquishment/delaying is a desirable thing, but I don’t think it is implementable in practice.
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