I don’t think making this list in 1980 would have been meaningful. How do you offer any sort of coherent, detailed plan for dealing with something when all you have is toy examples like Eliza?
I mean, I think many of the computing pioneers ‘basically saw’ AI risk. I noted some surprise that IJ Good didn’t write the precursor to this list in 1980, and apparently Wikipedia claims there was an unpublished statement in 1998 about AI x-risk; it’d be interesting to see what it contains and how much it does or doesn’t line up with our modern conception of why the problem is hard.
The historical figures who basically saw it (George Eliot 1879: “will the creatures who are to transcend and finally supersede us be steely organisms [...] performing with infallible exactness more than everything that we have performed with a slovenly approximativeness and self-defeating inaccuracy?”; Turing 1951: “At some stage therefore we should have to expect the machines to take control”) seem to have done so in the spirit of speculating about the cosmic process. The idea of coming up with a plan to solve the problem is an additional act of audacity; that’s not really how things have ever worked so far. (People make plans about their own lives, or their own businesses; at most, a single country; no one plans world-scale evolutionary transitions.)
I’m tempted to call this a meta-ethical failure. Fatalism, universal moral realism, and just-world intuitions seem to be the underlying implicit hueristics or principals that would cause this “cosmic process” thought-blocker.
I mean, I think many of the computing pioneers ‘basically saw’ AI risk. I noted some surprise that IJ Good didn’t write the precursor to this list in 1980, and apparently Wikipedia claims there was an unpublished statement in 1998 about AI x-risk; it’d be interesting to see what it contains and how much it does or doesn’t line up with our modern conception of why the problem is hard.
The historical figures who basically saw it (George Eliot 1879: “will the creatures who are to transcend and finally supersede us be steely organisms [...] performing with infallible exactness more than everything that we have performed with a slovenly approximativeness and self-defeating inaccuracy?”; Turing 1951: “At some stage therefore we should have to expect the machines to take control”) seem to have done so in the spirit of speculating about the cosmic process. The idea of coming up with a plan to solve the problem is an additional act of audacity; that’s not really how things have ever worked so far. (People make plans about their own lives, or their own businesses; at most, a single country; no one plans world-scale evolutionary transitions.)
I’m tempted to call this a meta-ethical failure. Fatalism, universal moral realism, and just-world intuitions seem to be the underlying implicit hueristics or principals that would cause this “cosmic process” thought-blocker.