You guys have had a discussion like this here on LW before, and you mention your disagreement with Carl Schulman in your foom economics paper. This is a complex subject and I don't expect you all to come to agreement, or even perfect understanding of each other's positions, in a short period of time, but it seems like you know surprisingly little about these other positions. Given its importance to your mission, I'm surprised you haven't set aside a day for the three of you and whoever else you think might be needed to at least come to understand each other's estimates on when foom might happen.
We spent quite a while on this once, but that was a couple of years ago and apparently things got out of date since then (also I think this was pre-Luke). It does seem like we need to all get together again and redo this, though I find that sort of thing very difficult and indeed outright painful when there's not an immediate policy question in play to ground everything.
The Register talks to Google's Alfred Spector:
Google's approach toward artificial intelligence embodies a new way of designing and running complex systems. Rather than create a monolithic entity with its own modules for reasoning about certain inputs and developing hypotheses that let it bootstrap its own intelligence into higher and higher abstractions away from base inputs, as other AI researchers did through much of the 60s and 70s, Google has instead taken a modular approach.
"We have the knowledge graph, [the] ability to parse natural language, neural network tech [and] enormous opportunities to gain feedback from users," Spector said in an earlier speech at Google IO. "If we combine all these things together with humans in the loop continually providing feedback our systems become ... intelligent."
Spector calls this his "combination hypothesis", and though Google is not there yet – SkyNet does not exist – you can see the first green buds of systems that have the appearance of independent intelligence via some of the company's user-predictive technologies such as Google Now, the new Maps and, of course, the way it filters search results according to individual identity.
(Emphasis mine.) I don't have a transcript, but there are videos online. Spector is clearly smart, and apparently he expects an AI to appear in a completely different way than Eliezer does. And he has all the resources and financing he wants, probably 3-4 orders of magnitude over MIRI's. His approach, if workable, also appears safe: it requires human feedback in the loop. What do you guys think?