It sounds like you're equating "AI" with "sentient intelligence with its own values and goals which will only arbitrarily coincide with ours." Certainly, that's a possibility--and one AI researchers would do well to avoid.
But the possible intelligences we can observe on this planet have more variety than that, and the useful intelligences we've created have even more. There's no reason a smarter-than-human AI couldn't simply be a general-purpose tool in the way that a faster-than-human spam classifier is a special-purpose tool.
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It sounds like you're equating "AI" with "sentient intelligence with its own values and goals which will only arbitrarily coincide with ours." Certainly, that's a possibility--and one AI researchers would do well to avoid.
But the possible intelligences we can observe on this planet have more variety than that, and the useful intelligences we've created have even more. There's no reason a smarter-than-human AI couldn't simply be a general-purpose tool in the way that a faster-than-human spam classifier is a special-purpose tool.