I’ll grant that MIRI could accelerate the creation of AGI, if their efforts to educate people about UFAI risks are particularly ineffective. But as far as UFAI creation at all is concerned, there are any number of very smart idiots in the world who would love to be on the news as “the first person to program an artificial general intelligence”. Or to be the first person to use a general AI to beat the stock market, as soon as enough parts of the puzzle have been worked out to make one by pasting together published math results. (Maybe a slightly more self-aware variation of AIXI-mc would do the trick.)
In my view, AGI is more or less inevitable, and MIRI is seemingly the only group publically interested in making it safe.
I’ll grant that MIRI could accelerate the creation of AGI, if their efforts to educate people about UFAI risks are particularly ineffective. But as far as UFAI creation at all is concerned, there are any number of very smart idiots in the world who would love to be on the news as “the first person to program an artificial general intelligence”. Or to be the first person to use a general AI to beat the stock market, as soon as enough parts of the puzzle have been worked out to make one by pasting together published math results. (Maybe a slightly more self-aware variation of AIXI-mc would do the trick.)
In my view, AGI is more or less inevitable, and MIRI is seemingly the only group publically interested in making it safe.