Prominent AI folk like Hans Moravec and Marvin Minsky had predicted the eclipse of humanity and humane values (save perhaps as pets/specimens/similar, losing the overwhelming majority of the future) long before Yudkowsky.
A minor point maybe, but...how big is the fraction of all AI researchers and computer scientists who fall into that category?
I.J. Good, Marcus Hutter, Jurgen Schmidhuber, Kevin Warwick, Stephen Omohundro, Vinge etc.
A strange list, IMO. Fredkin was one who definitely entertained the “pets” hypothesis:
It was rumoured in some of the UK national press of the time that Margaret Thatcher watched Professor Fredkin being interviewed on a late night TV science programme. Fredkin explained that superintelligent machines were destined to surpass the human race in intelligence quite soon, and that if we were lucky they might find human beings interesting enough to keep us around as pets.
It was generated by selecting (some) people who had written publications in the area, not merely oral statements. Broadening to include the latter would catch many more folk.
I was thinking of “Robot: from mere machine to transcendent mind” where he talks about an era in which humans survive through local tame robots, but eventually are devoured by competitive minds that have escaped beyond immediate control.
A strange list, IMO. Fredkin was one who definitely entertained the “pets” hypothesis:
http://www.dai.ed.ac.uk/homes/cam/Robots_Wont_Rule2.shtml#Bad
It was generated by selecting (some) people who had written publications in the area, not merely oral statements. Broadening to include the latter would catch many more folk.
Your list of Hans Moravec and Marvin Minsky was fine—though I believe Moravec characterised humans being eaten by robots as follows:
...though he did go on to say thay he was “not too bothered” by that because “in the long run, that’s how it’s going to be anyway”.
I was more complaining about XiXiDu’s “reframing” of the list.
I was thinking of “Robot: from mere machine to transcendent mind” where he talks about an era in which humans survive through local tame robots, but eventually are devoured by competitive minds that have escaped beyond immediate control.