> Building safe superintelligence (SSI) is the most important technical problem of our time. Call me a cranky old man but the superlatives in these sorts of announcements really annoy me. I want to ask: Have you surveyed every problem in the world? Are you aware of how much suffering there is outside of your office and how unresponsive it has been so far to improvements in artificial intelligence? Are you really sayi…
> Are you really saying that there is a nice total-ordering of problems by importance to the world, and that the one you're interested happens also to be at the top?
It might be the case that the reason Ilya is “interested in” this problem (to the degree of dedicating almost his entire career to it) is exactly because he believes it’s the most important.