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Let me get this straight: you want to recruit high-end geeks to combat a hypothetical threat from other very smart people who might invent computers so smart that they can program themselves to be way smarter than their inventors and rather quickly swing completely out of control and cause "human extinction."
How is this a problem? Do you read the news? Or look at television? If you can distract yourself from apocalyptic navel-gazing long enough to take in the world around us--and that does include you--you might observe that we are so much farther along on the march to that goal than the computers that we might create in some remote future like say 2060 that they will be long out of the running in the human extinction sweepstakes. If you did look around you might perceive credible estimates that by 2050 there will be 9 billion humans on this sad planet, all trying desperately to survive with 0 ocean fish available to feed them.
Humans:http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs//2007/pop952.doc.htm Fish: http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hipbi-mn7by4mFZ6veqVQ0OEmu9Q.
Consider these two estimates and the firestorm of discussion and passionate reaction they've aroused. Not. Consider Iran. The Gulf of Mexico. North Korea. Atmospheric temperature and its consequent ice melt and rise in sea water.
Makes me wish AI was real and thriving. It could hardly be stupider than us. Could it?
Meantime you might want to reconsider and aim those striving young minds toward something real.