The &quot;breakthrough&quot; AI of today is deep learning on massive amounts on data applied to two areas - speech&#x2F;NLP and vision. How this generalizes to a super intelligence that can take over the planet is so strange. Does a child need to look at billions of images to figure out what a chair or cat is? Will this AI figure out how to select a good business partner?<p>The problem is that you ask someone who is good in one field (say electric cars or theoretical physics) to opine on something like AI. The correct response is to say that you don&#x27;t know anything about AI. But, the ego of being an public intellectual prevents that. So, what is the safest option to not seeming dumb - say something like we need to make sure safeguards are place to protect AI from becoming dangerous and kill everyone.<p>Meanwhile people who actually build these systems know that these systems not are generalizable to variety of tasks (like humans) and they are not intelligent. Best case, they augment humans in their tasks.