Is that true? If we went back in time to before Darwin and gave a not-already-religious person (if we could find one) a thorough rationality lesson — enough to skillfully weigh the probabilities of competing hypotheses (including enough about cognitive science to know why intelligence and intentionality are not black boxes, must carry serious complexity penalties, and need to make specific advance predictions instead of just being invoked as "God wills it" retroactively about only the things that do happen), but not quite enough that they'd end up just inventing the theory of evolution themselves — wouldn't they conclude, even in the absence of any specific alternatives, that design was a non-explanation, a mysterious answer to a mysterious question? And even imagining that we managed to come up with a technical model of an intelligent designer, specifying in advance the structure of its mind and its goal system, could it actually compress the pre-Darwin knowledge about the natural world more than slightly?
As pointed out below, Hume is a good counterexample to my thesis above.
[...] SIAI's Scary Idea goes way beyond the mere statement that there are risks as well as benefits associated with advanced AGI, and that AGI is a potential existential risk.
[...] Although an intense interest in rationalism is one of the hallmarks of the SIAI community, still I have not yet seen a clear logical argument for the Scary Idea laid out anywhere. (If I'm wrong, please send me the link, and I'll revise this post accordingly. Be aware that I've already at least skimmed everything Eliezer Yudkowsky has written on related topics.)
So if one wants a clear argument for the Scary Idea, one basically has to construct it oneself.
[...] If you put the above points all together, you come up with a heuristic argument for the Scary Idea. Roughly, the argument goes something like: If someone builds an advanced AGI without a provably Friendly architecture, probably it will have a hard takeoff, and then probably this will lead to a superhuman AGI system with an architecture drawn from the vast majority of mind-architectures that are not sufficiently harmonious with the complex, fragile human value system to make humans happy and keep humans around.
The line of argument makes sense, if you accept the premises.
But, I don't.
Ben Goertzel: The Singularity Institute's Scary Idea (and Why I Don't Buy It), October 29 2010. Thanks to XiXiDu for the pointer.