In 1878 the Chief Engineer of British Post
Office, Sir William Preece thought, “The Americans have need of the telephone,
but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys.”
Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder
of Digital Equipment Corp argued against the PC in 1977 claiming, “There is no
reason anyone would want a computer in their home.”
Here is an argument between Eliezer Yudkowsky
of Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) and MIT’s computer scientist
Scott Aaronson.
Yudkowsky: It seems pretty obvious to me
that at some point in one to ten decades we’re going to build an AI smart
enough to improve itself, and it will “foom” upward in intelligence, and by
the time it exhausts available avenues for improvement it will be a
“superintelligence” relative to us. Aaronson's reply ...the thing we disagree
about is the time scale… a few thousand years before AI seems more
reasonable to me.
