Had Mother Nature been a real parent, she would have been in jail for child abuse and murder.

Human nature is a work in progress.

We should not be confident in our ability to keep a super-intelligent genie locked up in its bottle forever.

Knowledge about limitations of your data collection process affects what inferences you can draw from the data.

We would want the solution to the safety problem before somebody figures out the solution to the AI problem.

The greatest existential risks over the coming decades or century arise from certain, anticipated technological breakthroughs that we might make in particular, machine super intelligence, nanotechnology and synthetic biology. Each of these has an enormous potential for improving the human condition by helping cure disease, poverty, etc. But one could imagine them being misused, used to create powerful weapon systems, or even some kind of accidental destructive scenario, where we suddenly are in possession of some technology that's far more powerful than we are able to control or use wisely.

The cognitive functioning of a human brain depends on a delicate orchestration of many factors, especially during the critical stages of embryo development-and it is much more likely that this self-organizing structure, to be enhanced, needs to be carefully balanced, tuned, and cultivated rather than simply flooded with some extraneous potion.