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I found a historical quote that's relevant to AI Safety discussions. This is from the diary of President Harry Truman when he was in the recently-bombed Berlin in 1945. Just interesting to hear someone discuss value alignment so early. Source: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/primary-resources/truman-diary/
"I thought of Carthage, Baalbek, Jerusalem, Rome, Atlantis, Peking, Babylon, Nineveh, Scipio, Ramses II, Titus, Herman, Sherman, Genghis Khan, Alexander, Darius the Great -- but Hitler only destroyed Stalingrad -- and Berlin. I hope for some sort of peace, but I fear that machines are ahead of morals by some centuries and when morals catch up perhaps there'll be no reason for any of it. I hope not. But we are only termites on a planet and maybe when we bore too deeply into the planet there'll be a reckoning. Who knows?"