People can travel at the speed of light.
Attributing intelligence to narrow AI is the same mistake as attributing it to animals, no matter how sophisticated the knowledge in question may be.
Your human body is not you; it is an appendage that you are stuck with, that forces you to take care of it, and eventually pulls you with it into death. If you think death should be avoided, you will realize the urgency with which we should pursue this project. We need to build bodies that help us survive rather than our genes spread.
Knowledge of how to use the senses is neither encoded genetically nor can it possibly come from the senses, for that would lead to an infinite regress. So, where does it come from?
We have free will because we are the authors and enactors of our choices.
A programmer with the wrong epistemology will eventually fall prey to it, but armed with a good one, he is unstoppable.
Thus, the alignment problem and the control problem go away; they do not require a solution. We can now replace them with the question of how to help AGI learn.
It is the same [ideas] that cause stagnation and death on the level of society that cause depression in the individual.
Species and ecosystems do not contribute to the size and growth of economies. Only people do. And only explanations guessed by people tell us which resources, species, and ecosystems are at all relevant to economic growth.
The goal is to solve problems, not do good. Should you discover a solution with reach that does great good, wonderful. But if your goal is to do good, not only will you fail to solve problems: you will come up with criteria you deem unchangeable, for, if they are for the greater good, changing them seems immoral. Since problems are inevitable, you thereby cement in stone a faulty criterion which, down the road, will do the opposite of doing good: it will lead to stagnation, or worse yet, decline, and, eventually, death.