Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm just questioning whether an autopilot with a profit maximization heuristic is the best tool to guide technological progress. With democratic control I don't necessarily mean our current democratic systems but any kind of decentralization of decision making by voting. Yeah, I know that's vague, but given what appears be at stake it seems unreasonable not to consider alternatives.
I'm reading Rationality: From AI to Zombies, and it goes through exactly this argument. Here's the original post: http://lesswrong.com/lw/jb/applause_lights/
Fine, my suggestion to solve this problem democratically was an applause light. It was an unfinished thought and a call for action. I agree that this didn't convey any new information, I just wanted to express my distrust towards these kinds of appeasement statements from people who are working on these technologies. Being able to peak at different layers of a CNN doesn't recover NNs from the fact that they are in many regards opaque to us (and will possibly always be due to their complexity). Statements of the sort "I have never understood those charges" makes it sound like they are pretty much ignorant of the potential risks associated with not knowing exactly what your program does (they can perhaps be with regards to current technology, but I could imagine that more advanced systems can potentially arrive sooner than overall anticipated).