&gt;because machine learning is not even within sight from true AI<p>Well I don&#x27;t agree at all, and neither do many experts. It may not be very intelligent currently, but it&#x27;s certainly getting there.<p>&gt;How can we research the safety of something we know nothing about?<p>Even if AI uses totally unknown algorithms, that doesn&#x27;t mean we can&#x27;t do anything about it. The question of how to control AI is relatively agnostic to how the AI actually works. We don&#x27;t need to know the details of a machine learning algorithm to talk about reinforcement learning. We don&#x27;t need to know the exact AI algorithm to talk about how certain utility functions would lead to certain behaviors.