I guess feeding AIs the entire internet was a bad idea, because they picked up all of our human flaws, amplified by the internet, without a grounding in the physical world.I've been wrong about quite many things in my life, and right about at least a handful. In regards to AI though, the single biggest thing I ever got absolutely, completely, totally wrong was this:
In years past, I always thought that AI's would be developed by ethical researchers working in labs, and once somebody got to AGI (or even a remotely close approximation of it) that they would follow a path somewhat akin to Finch from Person of Interest[1] educating The Machine... painstakingly educating the incipient AI in a manner much like raising a child; teaching it moral lessons, grounding it in ethics; helping to shape its values so that it would generally Do The Right Thing and so on. But even falling short of that ideal, I NEVER (EVER) in a bazillion years, would have dreamed that somebody would have an idea as hare-brained as "Let's try to train the most powerful AI we can build, by feeding it roughly the entire extant corpus of human written works... including Reddit, 4chan, Twitter, etc."
Probably the single saving grace about the current situation is that the AI's we have still don't seem to be at the AGI level, although it's debatable how close we are (especially factoring in the possibility of "behind closed doors" research that hasn't been disclosed yet).
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_of_Interest_(TV_series)