appreciated among AI researchers. AI risk is not yet common knowledge either. In relation to the timeline of the first dissident message, I’d say we’re around the year 1988, when raising the Soviet-occupation topic was no longer a career-ending move but you still had to somewhat hedge your position. I hear similar hedging now—statements like, “Tm not concerned about superintelligent AI, but there are some real ethical issues in increased automation,” or “It’s good that some people are researching AI risk, but it’s not a short-term concern,” or even the very reasonable sounding, “These are small- probability scenarios, but their potentially high impact justifies the attention.” As far as message propagation goes, though, we are getting close to the tipping point. A recent survey of AI researchers who published at the two major international AI conferences in 2015 found that 40 percent now think that risks from highly advanced AI are either “an important problem” or “among the most important problems in the field.””? Of course, just as there were dogmatic Communists who never changed their position, it’s all but guaranteed that some people will never admit that AI is potentially dangerous. Many of the deniers of the first kind came from the Soviet nomenklatura; similarly, the Al-risk deniers often have financial or other pragmatic motives. One of the leading motives is corporate profits. Al is profitable, and even in instances where it isn’t, it’s at least a trendy, forward-looking enterprise with which to associate your company. So a lot of the dismissive positions are products of corporate PR and legal machinery. In some very real sense, big corporations are nonhuman machines that pursue their own interests—interests that might not align with those of any particular human working for them. As Wiener observed in Zhe Human Use of Human Beings: “When human atoms are knit into an organization in which they are used, not in their full right as responsible human beings,