From Aid's The Secret Sentry:
U.S. intelligence first learned about al-Hada and his telephone number from one of the captured al Qaeda planners of the August 1998 East Africa bombings, a Saudi national named Mohamed Rashed Daoud al-’Owhali, who was arrested by Kenyan authorities on August 12, 1998, five days after the bombing of the U.S. embassy in Nairobi. Interrogated by a team of FBI agents, al-’Owhali gave up the key relay number (011-967-1-200-578)—the telephone number of Ahmed al-Hada.
NSA immediately began intercepting al-Hada’s telephone calls. This fortuitous break could not have come at a better time for the U.S. intelligence community, since NSA had just lost its access to bin Laden’s satellite phone traffic. For the next three years, the telephone calls coming in and out of the al-Hada house in Sana’a were the intelligence community’s principal window into what bin Laden and al Qaeda were up to. The importance of the intercepted al-Hada telephone calls remains today a highly classified secret within the intelligence community, which continues to insist that al-Hada be referred to only as a “suspected terrorist facility in the Middle East” in declassified reports regarding the 9/11 intelligence disaster.
In January 1999, NSA intercepted a series of phone calls to the al-Hada house. (The agency later identified Pakistan as their point of origin.) NSA analysts found only one item of intelligence interest in the transcripts of these calls— references to a number of individuals believed to be al Qaeda operatives, one of whom was a man named Nawaf al-Hazmi. NSA did not issue any intelligence reports concerning the contents of these intercepts because al-Hazmi and the other individuals mentioned in the intercept were not known to NSA’s analysts at the time. Almost three years later, al-Hazmi was one of the 9/11 hijackers who helped crash the Boeing airliner into the Pentagon. That al-Hazmi succeeded in getting into the United States using his real name after being prominently mentioned in an intercepted telephone call with a known al Qaeda operative is but one of several huge mistakes made by the U.S. intelligence community that investigators learned about only after 9/11.
More (#6) from The Secret Sentry:
...The 1980s saw NSA grow from more than fifty thousand military and civilian personnel to seventy-five thousand in 1989, twenty-five thousand of whom worked at NSA headquarters at Fort Meade. In terms of manpower alone, the agency was the largest component of the U.S. intelligence community by far, with a headquarters staff larger than the entire CIA.
As the agency’s size grew at a staggering pace, so did the importance of its intelligence reporting. The amount of reporting produced by NSA during the 1980s was astronomical.
One open question in AI risk strategy is: Can we trust the world's elite decision-makers (hereafter "elites") to navigate the creation of human-level AI (and beyond) just fine, without the kinds of special efforts that e.g. Bostrom and Yudkowsky think are needed?
Some reasons for concern include:
But if you were trying to argue for hope, you might argue along these lines (presented for the sake of argument; I don't actually endorse this argument):
The basic structure of this 'argument for hope' is due to Carl Shulman, though he doesn't necessarily endorse the details. (Also, it's just a rough argument, and as stated is not deductively valid.)
Personally, I am not very comforted by this argument because:
Obviously, there's a lot more for me to spell out here, and some of it may be unclear. The reason I'm posting these thoughts in such a rough state is so that MIRI can get some help on our research into this question.
In particular, I'd like to know: