IMHO, AI safety is a thing now because AI is a thing now and when people see AI breakthroughs they tend to think of the Terminator.
Anyway, I agree that EY is good at getting funding and publicity (though not necessarily positive publicity), my comment was about his (lack of) proven technical abilities.
IMHO, AI safety is a thing now because AI is a thing now and when people see AI breakthroughs they tend to think of the Terminator.
Under that hypothesis, shouldn't AI safety have become a "thing" (by which I assume you mean "gain mainstream recognition") back when Deep Blue beat Kasparov?
There have been a couple of brief discussions of this in the Open Thread, but it seems likely to generate more so here's a place for it.
The original paper in Nature about AlphaGo.
Google Asia Pacific blog, where results will be posted. DeepMind's YouTube channel, where the games are being live-streamed.
Discussion on Hacker News after AlphaGo's win of the first game.