the alignment problem

it is beyond an emergency it's the biggest thing we need to do today it's bigger than climate change that the former Chief business Officer 00:01:04 of Google X an AI expert and best-selling author he's on a mission to save the world from AI before it's too late

In 2001, AI founder Marvin Minsky asked "So the question is why didn't we get HAL in 2001?"[167] Minsky believed that the answer is that the central problems, like commonsense reasoning, were being neglected, while most researchers pursued things like commercial applications of neural nets or genetic algorithms. John McCarthy, on the other hand, still blamed the qualification problem.[168] For Ray Kurzweil, the issue is computer power and, using Moore's Law, he predicted that machines with human-level intelligence will appear by 2029.[169] Jeff Hawkins argued that neural net research ignores the essential properties of the human cortex, preferring simple models that have been successful at solving simple problems.[170] There were many other explanations and for each there was a corresponding research program underway.

Eventually the earliest successful expert systems, such as XCON, proved too expensive to maintain. They were difficult to update, they could not learn, they were "brittle" (i.e., they could make grotesque mistakes when given unusual inputs), and they fell prey to problems (such as the qualification problem) that had been identified years earlier. Expert systems proved useful, but only in a few special contexts

In 1979, Russell Noftsker, being convinced that Lisp machines had a bright commercial future due to the strength of the Lisp language and the enabling factor of hardware acceleration, proposed to Greenblatt that they commercialize the technology.[citation needed] In a counter-intuitive move for an AI Lab hacker, Greenblatt acquiesced, hoping perhaps that he could recreate the informal and productive atmosphere of the Lab in a real business. These ideas and goals were considerably different from those of Noftsker. The two negotiated at length, but neither would compromise. As the proposed firm could succeed only with the full and undivided assistance of the AI Lab hackers as a group, Noftsker and Greenblatt decided that the fate of the enterprise was up to them, and so the choice should be left to the hackers. The ensuing discussions of the choice divided the lab into two factions. In February 1979, matters came to a head. The hackers sided with Noftsker, believing that a commercial venture fund-backed firm had a better chance of surviving and commercializing Lisp machines than Greenblatt's proposed self-sustaining start-up. Greenblatt lost the battle.