Alon Halevy, a faculty member in the University of Washington's computer science department and an editor at the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, said he's not worried about friendliness.
"As a practical matter, I'm not concerned at all about AI being friendly or not," Halevy said. "The challenges we face are so enormous to even get to the point where we can call a system reasonably intelligent, that whether they are friendly or not will be an issue that is relatively easy to solve."
Better late than never, a new open thread. Even with the discussion section, there are ideas or questions too short or inchoate to be worth a post.
This thread is for the discussion of Less Wrong topics that have not appeared in recent posts. If a discussion gets unwieldy, celebrate by turning it into a top-level post.