Interview series on risks from AI

In 2011, Alexander Kruel (XiXiDu) started a Q&A style interview series asking various people about their perception of artificial intelligence and possible risks associated with it.

Interviews

A list of all interviews:

• Dr. Brandon Rohrer, Professor Tim Finin and Dr. Pat Hayes
• Professor Nils John Nilsson, Professor Peter J. Bentley, Professor David Alan Plaisted and Dr. Hector Levesque
• Professor Paul Cohen, Professor Alan Bundy, Dr. Pei Wang, Dr. J. Storrs Hall and Dr. William Uther
• Professor Michael G. Dyer, Dr. John Tromp, Dr. Kevin Korb, Dr. Leo Pape, Professor Peter Gacs, Professor Donald Loveland, Eray Ozkural, Dr. Laurent Orseau, Richard Loosemore and Monica Anderson
• Professor John E. Laird and Dr. Kristinn R. Thorisson
• Dr. Randal A. Koene and Alexey Potapov of AIDEUS
• Professor Larry Wasserman
• Dr. Mark Changizi
• Professor Michael Littman
• Dr. Shane Legg
• Professor Jürgen Schmidhuber
• Professor Stan Franklin
• Dr. Matt Mahoney
• Sir William Timothy Gowers
• Abram Demski
• Dr. Richard Carrier

Questions

The current set of questions:

• Assuming beneficial political and economic development and that no global catastrophe halts progress, by what year would you assign a 10%/50%/90% chance of the development of artificial intelligence that is roughly as good as humans (or better, perhaps unevenly) at science, mathematics, engineering and programming?
• Once we build AI that is roughly as good as humans (or better, perhaps unevenly) at science, mathematics, engineering and programming, how much more difficult will it be for humans and/or AIs to build an AI which is substantially better at those activities than humans?
• Do you ever expect artificial intelligence to overwhelmingly outperform humans at typical academic research, in the way that they may soon overwhelmingly outperform humans at trivia contests, or do you expect that humans will always play an important role in scientific progress?
• What probability do you assign to the possibility of an AI with initially roughly professional human-level competence (or better, perhaps unevenly) at general reasoning (including science, mathematics, engineering and programming) to self-modify its way up to vastly superhuman capabilities within a matter of hours/days/< 5 years?
• How important is it to research risks associated with artificial intelligence that is good enough at general reasoning (including science, mathematics, engineering and programming) to be capable of radical self-modification, before attempting to build one?
• What probability do you assign to the possibility of human extinction within 100 years as a result of AI capable of self-modification (that is not provably non-dangerous, if that is even possible)? P(human extinction by AI | AI capable of self-modification and not provably non-dangerous is created)

Mail Template

The exact wording of the email:

Subject: Questions regarding possible risks from artificial intelligence

Dear Professor/Dr NAME,

I am currently trying to learn more about the academic perception of artificial general intelligence and possible risks associated with it. Consequently I am curious about your opinion as a noted expert.

I would like to ask you a few questions and your permission to publish your possible answers in order to estimate the academic awareness and perception of risks from AI. I am not a journalist and do not represent any publication, nor do I maintain a formal academic relationship. I am conducting an informal interview for a community blog: lesswrong.com

Please let me know if you have any questions or if you are interested in third-party material that does expand on various aspects of my questions.

Here is a list of people that I had a chance to interview so far: NAMES

QUESTIONS

Yours sincerely,

NAME

ADDRESS

See also

• Muehlhauser interview series on AGI
• When Will AI Be Created?
• AI timeline predictions: are we getting better?
• Stuart Armstrong: How We’re Predicting AI, The Singularity Summit 2012
• Experts on artificial general intelligence provide estimates for the future of AGI., Baum, Seth D., Ben Goertzel, and Ted G. Goertzel, 2011.
• Machine Intelligence Survey, Sandberg, A. and Bostrom, N. (2011). Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford University.