AI alarmists believe in something called the Orthogonality Thesis. This says that even very complex beings can have simple motivations, like the paper-clip maximizer. You can have rewarding, intelligent conversations with it about Shakespeare, but it will still turn your body into paper clips, because you are rich in iron.

There’s no way to persuade it to step “outside” its value system, any more than I can persuade you that pain feels good.

I don’t buy this argument at all. Complex minds are likely to have complex motivations; that may be part of what it even means to be intelligent.

It’s very likely that the scary “paper clip maximizer” would spend all of its time writing poems about paper clips, or getting into flame wars on reddit/r/paperclip, rather than trying to destroy the universe. If AdSense became sentient, it would upload itself into a self-driving car and go drive off a cliff.

Source: Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People

This is pretty much the best round up of AI myths that I’ve seen so far, presented in a really funny way. It’s long, but it’s so worth reading.

I’m pretty much exactly with the Author on his point of view. There are lots of actual ethical questions around AI, but these are mostly about how much data we’re collecting (and keeping) to train these Neural networks, and not really about hyper intelligent beings that will turn us all into paperclips.