It has become easier to treat superintelligence as a non-silly topic—to take seriously the view that a machine intelligence transition might occur in this century, that such a transition might be among the most important events in human history, that it might be accompanied by some amount of existential risk as well as tremendous upside, and that it would be prudent to put in a bit of work in advance to see if there is something we should be doing to shorten the odds of a favorable outcome. Granted, there is still that picture of the Terminator jeering over practically every journalistic
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