Scientists and entrepreneurs knew the dangers of AI a quarter-century ago.
Early on, as today, some of the scientific pioneers were thrilled about the future. In his 1988 book Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence, Hans Moravec, a founder of Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute, predicted that cyberintelligence would surpass human intelligence within 40 years.
One review of Mind Children called Moravec’s attitude “irresponsible optimism”.
In the late 1990s, Eliezer Yudkowsky was working on AGI, or artificial general intelligence, models. In 2001, he founded the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) and published “ Creating Friendly AI 1.0: The analysis and design of benevolent architectures ”, a paper extolling the utopian potential of the “transhuman mind”.
By 2002, he began worrying about that mind escaping human control.
By 2003, as he explained later in a series of posts called “ Yudkowsky’s Coming of Age ”, he stopped developing and started warning.
By 2025, with the Miri president Nate Soares, Yudkowsy would publish If Anyone Builds It, Everyone will Die.
At around the same time, Bill Joy was having misgivings. Like Yudkowsky’s posts, Joy’s 2000 piece in Wired, Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us, retraced his development from inquisitive child to computer prodigy to profound skeptic of human genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and robotics.
Philosopher John Leslie estimated the odds of human extinction at 30% or more.
The Unabomber murdered three people and injured 23, some near fatally.
In film 2001 Dave the astronaut manages to disable Hal, a happy ending.
Judith Levine is a Brooklyn-based journalist and frequent contributor to the Guardian.