"And I heard a voice saying 'Give up! Give up!' And that really scared me 'cause it sounded like Ben Kenobi." (source)
Friendly AI is a humongous damn multi-genius-decade sized problem. The first step is to realize this, and the second step is to find some fellow geniuses and spend a decade or two solving it. If you're looking for a quick fix you're out of luck.
The same (albeit to a lesser degree) is fortunately also true of Artificial General Intelligence in general, which is why the hordes of would-be meddling dabblers haven't killed us all already.
This article (which I happened across today) written by Ben Goertzel should make interesting reading for a would-be AI maker. It details Ben's experience trying to build an AGI during the dot-com bubble. His startup company, Webmind, Inc., apparently had up to 130 (!) employees at its peak.
According to the article, the AGI was almost completed, and the main reason his effort failed was that the company ran out of money due to the bursting of the bubble. Together with the anthropic principle, this seems to imply that Ben is the person responsible for the st...
A friend of mine is about to launch himself heavily into the realm of AI programming. The details of his approach aren't important; probabilities dictate that he is unlikely to score a major success. He's asked me for advice, however, on how to design a safe(r) AI. I've been pointing him in the right directions and sending him links to useful posts on this blog and the SIAI.
Do people here have any recommendations they'd like me to pass on? Hopefully, these may form the basis of a condensed 'warning pack' for other AI makers.
Addendum: Advice along the lines of "don't do it" is vital and good, but unlikely to be followed. Coding will nearly certainly happen; is there any way of making it less genocidally risky?