Definitely! See Wikipedia and e.g. this book.

I think Google is still quite aways from AGI, but in all seriousness, if there was ever a compelling interest of national security to be used as a basis for nationalizing inventions, AGI would be it. At the very least, we need some serious regulation of how such efforts are handled.

Bostrom's wonderful book lays out many important issues and frames a lot of research questions which it is up to all of us to answer.

Thanks to Katja for her introduction and all of these good links.

One issue that I would like to highlight: The mixture of skills and abilities that a person has is not the same as the set of skills which could result in the dangers Bostrom will discuss later, or other dangers and benefits which he does not discuss.

For this reason, in the next phase of this work, we have to understand what specific future technologies could lead us to what specific outcomes.

Systems which are quite deficient in some ways, relative to people, may still be extremely dangerous.

Meanwhile, the intelligence of a single person, even a single genius, taken in isolation and only allowed to acquire limited resources actually is not all that dangerous. People become dangerous when they form groups, access the existing corpus of human knowledge, coordinate among each other to deploy resources and find ways to augment their abilities.

"Human-level intelligence" is only a first-order approximation to the set of skills and abilities which should concern us.

If we want to prevent disaster, we have to be able to distinguish dangerous systems. Unfortunately, checking whether a machine can do all of the things a person can is not the correct test.

Are there any ongoing efforts to model the intelligent behaviour of other organisms besides the human model?

What did you find most interesting in this week's reading?

What do you think of I. J. Good's argument? (p4)