FAI is only a problem because of AI. The imminence of the problem depends on where AI is now and how rapidly it is progressing. To know these things, one must know how AI (real, current and past AI, not future, hypothetical AI, still less speculative, magical AI) is done, and to know this in technical terms, not fluff.
I don’t know how much your friend knows already, but perhaps a crash course in Russell and Norvig, plus technical papers on developments since then (i.e. Deep Learning) would be appropriate.
There’s no such thing, any more than there is research into alien flying saucers with nanolasers of doom. There’s a lot of fiction and armchair speculation, but that’s not research.
Any reason he’s not trying to fix his phobia by conventional means?
What I mean is that he’d be interested in working for MIRI, but not, say, OpenAI, or even a startup where he’d be doing lots of deep learning, if he overcomes his phobia.
Oops. I’ve tried to clarify that he’s only interested in FAI research, not AI research on the whole.
I think that interest in AI research in general would help to demystify the whole topic a bit, it would make it look a little bit less like magic.
FAI is only a problem because of AI. The imminence of the problem depends on where AI is now and how rapidly it is progressing. To know these things, one must know how AI (real, current and past AI, not future, hypothetical AI, still less speculative, magical AI) is done, and to know this in technical terms, not fluff.
I don’t know how much your friend knows already, but perhaps a crash course in Russell and Norvig, plus technical papers on developments since then (i.e. Deep Learning) would be appropriate.
There’s no such thing, any more than there is research into alien flying saucers with nanolasers of doom. There’s a lot of fiction and armchair speculation, but that’s not research.
Any reason he’s not trying to fix his phobia by conventional means?
What I mean is that he’d be interested in working for MIRI, but not, say, OpenAI, or even a startup where he’d be doing lots of deep learning, if he overcomes his phobia.
It might be that his interest in FAI is tied to his phobia so if the phobia goes away, so may the interest...