Earlier in this thread:
Specifically you could start by learning about the work already being done in the field of AGI and applying your x-risk ideas to that body of knowledge instead of reinventing the wheel (as AI safety people sadly have often done).
The "reinventing the wheel" I was referencing was the work based on AIXI as a general intelligence algorithm. AIXI does not scale. It is to AGI what photon mapping is to real-time rendering. It is already well known that AIXI will result in all sorts of wireheading like behavior. Yet the proofs of this are heavily dependent on the AIXI architecture, and hence my first issue: I don't trust that these failure modes apply to other architectures unless they can be independently demonstrated there.
My second issue is what I engaged Vaniver on: these are results showing failure modes where the AI's reward function doesn't result in the desired behavior -- it wireheads instead. That's not a very interesting result. On the face it is basically just saying that AI software can be buggy. Yes software can be buggy, and we know how to deal with that. In my day job I manage a software dev team for safety critical systems. What is really being argued here is that AI has fundamentally different error modes than regular safety-critical software, because the AI could end up acting adversarialy and optimizing us out of existence, and being successful at it. That, I am arguing, is both an unjustified cognitive leap and not demonstrated by the examples here.
I replied here because I don't think I really have more to say on the topic beyond this one post.
There have been a few attempts to reach out to broader audiences in the past, but mostly in very politically/ideologically loaded topics.
After seeing several examples of how little understanding people have about the difficulties in creating a friendly AI, I'm horrified. And I'm not even talking about a farmer on some hidden ranch, but about people who should know about these things, researchers, software developers meddling with AI research, and so on.
What made me write this post, was a highly voted answer on stackexchange.com, which claims that the danger of superhuman AI is a non-issue, and that the only way for an AI to wipe out humanity is if "some insane human wanted that, and told the AI to find a way to do it". And the poster claims to be working in the AI field.
I've also seen a TEDx talk about AIs. The talker didn't even hear about the paperclip maximizer, and the talk was about the dangers presented by the AIs as depicted in the movies, like the Terminator, where an AI "rebels", but we can hope that AIs would not rebel as they cannot feel emotion, so we should hope the events depicted in such movies will not happen, and all we have to do is for ourselves to be ethical and not deliberately write malicious AI, and then everything will be OK.
The sheer and mind-boggling stupidity of this makes me want to scream.
We should find a way to increase public awareness of the difficulty of the problem. The paperclip maximizer should become part of public consciousness, a part of pop culture. Whenever there is a relevant discussion about the topic, we should mention it. We should increase awareness of old fairy tales with a jinn who misinterprets wishes. Whatever it takes to ingrain the importance of these problems into public consciousness.
There are many people graduating every year who've never heard about these problems. Or if they did, they dismiss it as a non-issue, a contradictory thought experiment which can be dismissed without a second though:
We don't want our future AI researches to start working with such a mentality.
What can we do to raise awareness? We don't have the funding to make a movie which becomes a cult classic. We might start downvoting and commenting on the aforementioned stackexchange post, but that would not solve much if anything.