Indeed, “building powerful technology we can’t control could lead the technology to cause us grave harm” has been very widely accepted since 1918, and applying it to the robots has been floated at least as far back as R.U.R. in 1920. Yudkowsky’s contribution was, roughly, fusing this longstanding idea with Extropian “Shock Level 4” ideas…
Indeed, “building powerful technology we can’t control could lead the technology to cause us grave harm” has been very widely accepted since 1918, and applying it to the robots has been floated at least as far back as R.U.R. in 1920. Yudkowsky’s contribution was, roughly, fusing this longstanding idea with Extropian “Shock Level 4” ideas about the nature of intelligence, which is exactly the sort of thing I’d expect to get filed off during popularization. (And originally his version of General Semantics mystical introspection was also very important, although that’s been quietly jettisoned by now.)
Indeed, “building powerful technology we can’t control could lead the technology to cause us grave harm” has been very widely accepted since 1918, and applying it to the robots has been floated at least as far back as R.U.R. in 1920. Yudkowsky’s contribution was, roughly, fusing this longstanding idea with Extropian “Shock Level 4” ideas about the nature of intelligence, which is exactly the sort of thing I’d expect to get filed off during popularization. (And originally his version of General Semantics mystical introspection was also very important, although that’s been quietly jettisoned by now.)