Obviously a ridiculous claim! What is the chance that this browser thing will be “the world’s standard interface for electronic information”? (From Kevin Kelly’s column today of observations from 1994.)

At the end of the day, whether it’s geopolitics or artificial intelligence, I am a resolute optimist. I’ve never understood the point of being anything else if you want to change the world for the better.

Unabomber manifesto had section on AI Amusingly even Kaczynski couldn’t muster the intellectual arrogance to predict x-risk to all humankind - calling it unknowable His concern was lack of meaningful work, centralization of power & a ‘soft-liberal’ elite

Wrong understanding -> wrong action -> wrong outcome. Belief that you can predict the end of the world and that we need to create policies to stop an imagined apocalypse can and do cause real problems. The Population Bomb led to the One Child Policy and caused the very problem it was trying to solve. Anti-nuclear activists fought one of the cleanest energies on the planet to 'save the planet' and ended up doing tremendous damage to the planet they were trying to save (they are still doing it). Mao's Red Guards believed that capitalism was evil and that only collectivism could save China and they helped cause massive starvation and famine across the countryside. History is chock-full with people promising to save us all from the end of the world and doing massive damage instead. Beware of do-gooders baring gifts.

A pioneer of cybernetics built this machine and warned its further development risked killing all humans: "The thinking machine might ultimately sustain, repair and protect itself. It might even conclude that man is unnecessary and decide to destroy him, Dr. Ashley said."

@geoffreyhinton You and Yoshua are inadvertently helping those who want to put AI research and development under lock and key and protect their business by banning open research, open-source code, and open-access models. This will inevitably lead to bad outcomes in the medium term.

Fears the Internet could be ruined by autonomous exploit finding software is not new. In 1995 there was a huge debate about whether open source exploit finding software should be allowed.