Along with the views of EY (which such readers would already know) I present the singularity views of Robin Hanson and Ray Kurzweil, and discuss the intelligence enhancing potential of brain training, smart drugs, and eugenics. My thesis is that there are so many possible paths to super-human intelligence and such incredible military and economic benefits to develop super-human intelligence that unless we destroy our high-tech civilization we will almost certainly develop it.

Hard to say about the time because I worked on both books while also doing other projects. I suspect I could have done the Singularity book in about 1.5 years of full time effort. I don't have a good estimate for the textbook. Alas, I have lost money on the singularity book because the advance wasn't all that big, and I had personal expenses such as hiring a research assistant and paying a publicist. The textbook had a decent advance, still I probably earned roughly minimum wage for it. Surprisingly, I've done fairly well with my first book, Game Theory at Work, in part because of translation rights. With Game Theory at Work I've probably earned several times the minimum wage. Of course, I'm a professor and part of my salary from my college is to write, and I'm not including this.

I wanted to write a free market microeconomics textbook, and there are very few of these. I was recruited to write the textbook by the people who published Game Theory at Work. Had the textbook done very well, I could have made a huge amount of money (roughly equal to my salary as a professor) indefinitely. Alas, this didn't happen but the odds of it happening were well under 50%. Since teaching microeconomics is a big part of my job as a college professor, there was a large overlap between writing the textbook and becoming a better teacher. My textbook publisher sent all of my chapters to other teachers of microeconomics to get their feedback, and so I basically got a vast amount of feedback from experts on how I teach microeconomics.

No. I ran as a Republican in one of the most Democratic districts in Massachusetts, my opponent was the second most powerful person in the Massachusetts State Senate, and even Republicans in my district had a high opinion of him.

Greater economic growth means more money for AI research from companies and governments and if you think that AI will probably go wrong then this is a source of trouble. But there are benefits as well including increased charitable contributions for organizations that reduce existential risk and better educational systems in India and China which might produce people who end up helping MIRI. Overall, I'm not sure how this nets out.

Catch up growth is not necessarily safe because it will increase the demand for products that use AI and so increase the amount of resources companies such as Google devote to AI.

The only safe path is someone developing a mathematically sound theory of friendly AI, but this will be easier if we get (probably via China) intelligence enhancement with eugenics.

Not really. Someone (I forgot who) wrote that I helped them see the race to create AI as a potential existential risk. I promoted the book on numerous radio shows and I hope I convinced at least a few people to do further research and perhaps donate money to MIRI, but this is just a hope.

Yes it is useful. I define the singularity as a threshold of time at which machine intelligence or increases in human intelligence radically transform society. As similar incentives and technologies are pushing us towards this, it's useful to lump them together with a single term.