&gt;Perhaps. But if that is the case, the people who are most intelligent by this definition are far from the ones recognized as intelligent by the AI-fearing community. Let me put it this way: Albert Einstein and Richard Feynman would not be among them. Adolf Hitler, on the other hand, would be a genius.<p>How so? Feynman in particular was quite able to continually accomplish his goals, and he purposely chose divergent goals to test himself (his whole &quot;I&#x27;ll be a biologist this summer&quot; thing).<p>And yes, see my original comment re: it takes intelligence to walk into the DAP meeting and join as member 55 and come out conquering mainland Europe.<p>&gt;I do, however, don&#x27;t understand what you mean by &quot;a massive issue&quot;. Do you mean imminent danger? Yes, I guess it&#x27;s possible, but being familiar with the state of the art, I can at least discount the &quot;imminent&quot; part.<p>The state of the art is irrelevant here; in particular, most of AI seems to be moving in the direction of &quot;use computers to emulate human neural hardware and use massive amounts of training data to compensate for the relative sparseness of the artificial neural networks.&quot;<p>What&#x27;s imminently dangerous about AI is that all it really takes is a few innovations that might be in seemingly unrelated areas enable probably several people who see the pattern to go and implement AI. This is how most innovation happens, but here it could be very dangerous, because...<p>&gt;What I fail to see is compelling arguments why AI is any more dangerous or any more imminent than hundreds of bigger, more imminent threats.<p>AI could totally destabilize our society in a matter of hours. Our infrastructure is barely secure against human attackers, and it could be totally obliterated by an AI that chose to do that, or incidentally caused it to happen. An AI might not be able to launch nukes directly (in the US at least, who knows what the Russians have hooked up to computers), but it could almost certainly make it seem to any nuclear power that another nuclear power had launched a nuclear attack. There actually are places that will just make molecules you send them, so if the AI figures out protein folding, it could wipe out humanity with a virus.<p>AI is more dangerous than most things, because it has:<p>* limitless capability for action<p>* near instantaneous ability to act<p>The second one is really key; there&#x27;s nearly nothing that would make shit hit the fan FASTER than a hostile AI.<p>If you have a list of hundreds of bigger, more imminent threats, that can take humanity from 2015 to 20000BCE in a day, I&#x27;d like to see it.<p>&gt;I doubt you would say their defining quality is intelligence.<p>I&#x27;m confused as to how you can read three comments of &quot;intelligence is the ability to accomplish goals&quot; and then say &quot;people who have chosen to become politically powerful and accomplished that goal must not be people you consider intelligent.&quot;<p>&gt;You wouldn&#x27;t say they are of average intelligence, but I don&#x27;t think you&#x27;d recognize their intelligence as being superior.<p>Well, they can exploit people. How&#x27;s that for superiority?<p>My background is admittedly in cognitive psychology, not clinical, but I do see your point here. I&#x27;d like to make two distinctions:<p>* A generally intelligent person (say, Feynman) could learn to manipulate people and would almost certainly be successful at it<p>* People that are most adept at manipulating people, usually are that way because that&#x27;s the main skill they&#x27;ve trained themselves for over the course of their lives.<p>&gt;it is not among the top ten.<p>Of the top ten, what would take less than a week to totally destroy our current civilization?