One key thing about the result is that it doesn't mean that the probability of survival is 30%. The prison director can choose an arrangement such that the strategy is guaranteed to fail. If the prison director is intelligent and after your life, you are infinitely more likely to survive by opening boxes randomly.
I don't quite understand the sudden optimism around the feasibility of strong AI. The only major advancement in the last two decades seems to be neural nets in pattern recognition. Before deep learning, pattern recognition wasn't even considered proper AI. The other advancements seem to be just based on better compute and not a new revolutionary idea.
I hope people also get to hear from researchers on the other side of the argument (like Michael Jordan): the real risk is not super-intelligent AI destroying human race, but stupid AI being handed over control of critical aspects of our daily lives.
The matrix exponentiation algorithm in the link you sent is O(log(n)). Yes, this might seem strange because the output (F_n) itself has n bits. But in practice most of the implementations would use long integers for output, so log(F_n) < 64 for these implementations.
Based on my limited experience, most of the good engineers I know measure and care about quantifiable things like latency, throughput etc. They generally tend to get frustrated with fuzzy things like accuracy. (Data) Scientists, on the other hand, seem to be much more happier dealing with things like accuracy. "Ethicalness", however, nobody seems to care about measuring.
When I was single, for most of my big projects I used to get 70-80% of the work done in 4-5 days of being in the zone. And then spend months on changing the bells and whistles. Now I have to be home at a reasonable hour and hopefully in a good mood. So I have become hesitant to even get into the zone, because getting out of this state of high efficiency would make me extremely irritable.
How do married people or those with kids balance such bursts of creativity with personal commitments to their family ?