Thank you for the compliment.

Stephen Hawking partakes in research, with Intel, mostly on speech recognition, to help him being able to better express himself.

Elon Musk funds several startups in the field of advanced AI.

You don't get it. Science relies on published peer reviewed, repeatable, testable evidence. Not the authority of famous, rich, or even smart people. You can accept authority as much as you personally want, but the reason society progresses technologically, and even towards an artificial intelligence, is because of published, peer reviewed, testable, repeatable evidence. If what they fear is backed by such evidence then they should make such evidence available.

So you changed your mind? Partaking into and funding research on the subject is now not sufficient to express themselves? And i'm the one not being cohesive?

And please stop with your arogant (and erronous) definition of what science is and science is not.

Higgs theorized the Higg's boson existence in the 60s, that could not be tested until 50 years later, are you saying this was not science? Einstein's general relativity predicted the existence of black holes in 1916, we still don't have definit, hard proof of their existence, is it not science? The Big Bang theorie has never been proven (data from last year BICEP2 experiment are still being dissected), is it not science?

Should we not talk about all this subjects because they are not proven?

What you are referring to, is the scientific method, which is the way we use to decide if something is sufficiently proven to be deemed as true or not, not the definition of science itself.

Publishing and peer-review is one part of science, but you are missing an equally important one, which is coming up with (hopefully testable) hypotheses.

But how can you have something testable about something that does not exist yet? You would have to have evidence that an actual, intelligent program does something hostile, which is obviously impossible at the time since AGI has not been invented yet.

However, we do have evidence of naturally occuring hostile intelligence. If an AGI is vastly superior in some regards (for example through much tighter integration in knowledge and control systems), it could in fact pose a danger. The article even clearly states a hypothesis: "Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete and would be superseded."

We can’t really assign a probability of occurrence to scenarios like these, thus we have to include it in the list of events that could potentially wipe us out and which we may be able to prevent. Since people are actively working on AGI, it should probably be somewhere at the top where nuclear warfare, global warming and comet impacts are listed.