“For the record, I’ve been a coder and judged myself a reasonable hacker—set out to design my own programming language at one point, which I say not as a mark of virtue but just to demonstrate that I was in the game. (Gave it up when I realized AI wasn’t about programming languages.)”
AI is about programming languages since AI is about computers, and current “AI” languages really aren’t that great. I would say that it would be of huge value if someone could design an AI specific language that would be better then Lisp. Also a programming language that better deals with mass parallelism would be of great value to AI. Devoting yourself to that goal would further AI since the problem is one of theory and one of enabling technology.
Just an aside the good hacker in your own view isn’t a good metric due to the fact that people always think of themselves as being better at something then they really are.
PK you are absolutely right. We can even take things a step further and say positive AI will happen regardless of Eliezer’s involvement, and even as far as to say his involvement not having the needed experience in both math and programming will be as a cheerleader and not someone who makes it happen.