Supposing you did want to regulate AI research, how could you tell whether a program was getting close enough to AI to be dangerous?
One idea for a first pass could be: Suppose you had a computer with 1000 times the computing power than the best supercomputer has. Would running your algorithm on that machine be dangerous on its own?
For example I think even with 1000x computing power the Deep learning type approach would be ok. It would just let you have really good image/voice/action recognizers. On the other hand consider Deep Mind's general game playing program which plays a variety of simple video games near optimally including exploiting bugs. A system like this at 1000x power ...
"I'm increasingly inclined to thing there should be some regulatory oversight, maybe at the national and international level just to make sure that we don't do something very foolish."
http://www.cnet.com/news/elon-musk-we-are-summoning-the-demon-with-artificial-intelligence/#ftag=CAD590a51e