Did they field your questions?

Stross did, Hanson said he doesn't like email interviews. But Stross didn't state his explicit permission that I am allowed to publish his answers. And since I was mainly interested in his opinion myself I didn't bother to ask him again. But I don't think he would be bothered at all if I provide an extract?

He seems to think that embodied cognition plays an important role. In other words, human intelligence is strongly dependent on physiology.

Further, as far as I understand him, he believes to some extent into the Kurzweilian adaption of technology. It will be slowly creeping into our environment in the form of expert systems capable of human-like information processing.

Other points include that risks from friendly AI are to be taken seriously as well. For example, having some superhuman intelligence around who has it all figured out will deprive much of our intellectual curiosity of its value.

He mostly commented on existential risks, e.g. that we don't need AI to wipe us out:

I'm much more concerned about cheap, out-of-control gene hacking and synthetic organisms. The Australian mousepox/interleukin-4 experiment demonstrates the probable existence of a short, cheap path to human extinction, and that's something they stumbled across pretty much by accident. There's a lot we don't know about human immunobiology that can bite us on the ass -- see the TGN1412 accident, for example, or SARS. I find the idea of some idiot accidentally releasing a strain of the common cold that triggers cytokine storm terrifying. Not because anyone would want to do that, but because it could happen by accident.

Grey goo seems to be thermodynamically impossible, and anyway, we've got an existence proof for nanotechnology replicators in the shape of carbon-based life -- but knowing grey goo is impossible is no damn consolation if you've got necrotising fasciitis or ebola zaire.

His comment on AI and FOOM:

Similarly, I suspect we're still a way from understanding the neurobiological underpinnings of human intelligence -- we don't even have a consensus definition of what it means to be human and conscious...it's like asking, during a debate on the possibility of heavier-than-air powered flight in 1901, what the possibility is of developing an ornithopter than will eventually lay eggs. The question relies on multiple sequential assumptions that I think are individually invalid, or at least highly unlikely...

Can you think of any milestone such that if it were ever reached you would expect human‐level machine intelligence to be developed within five years thereafter?

A good functional simulation of a human neuron, and a good block level functional model of how the human brain and peripheral nervous system operates. There may well be unforseen gotchas along the way: immune system modulation, hormone effects, other tissues found to conduct an action potential (e.g. glial cells) which radically modify the picture before we get there.

Alternatively, show me a household robot that can clean the toilet or sew a new hem on a pair of jeans and I'll start stocking up on canned goods and ammunition. (A lot of "trivial" tasks in the human environment are remarkably hard to handle by mechanised logic.)

(Oh, and he somtimes reads LW.)