At some point soon, I'm going to attempt to steelman the position of those who reject the AI risk thesis, to see if it can be made solid. Here, I'm just asking if people can link to the most convincing arguments they've found against AI risk.
EDIT: Thanks for all the contribution! Keep them coming...
Verification seems like a strictly simpler problem. If we can't prove properties for a web server, how are we going to do anything about a completely unspecified AI?
The AI take over scenarios I've head almost always involve some kind of hacking, because today hacking is easy. I don't see why that would necessarily be the case a decade from now. We could prove some operating system security guarantees for instance.
Yes, verification is a strictly simpler problem, and one that's fairly thoroughly addressed by existing research -- which is why people working specifically on AI safety are paying attention to other things.
(Maybe they should actually be working on doing verification better first, but that doesn't seem obviously a superior strategy.)
Some AI takeover scenarios involve hacking (by the AI, of other systems). We might hope to make AI safer by making that harder, but that would require securing all the other important computer systems in the world. Even though making an AI safe is really hard, it may well be easier than that.