summerstay comments on Reply to Holden on The Singularity Institute - Less Wrong
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How would you even pose the question of AI risk to someone in the eighteenth century?
I'm trying to imagine what comes out the other end of Newton's chronophone, but it sounds very much like "You should think really hard about how to prevent the creation of man-made gods."
There are very few people who would have understood in the 18th century, but Leibniz would have understood in the 17th. He underestimated the difficulty in creating an AI, like everyone did before the 1970s, but he was explicitly trying to do it.
Your definition of "explicit" must be different from mine. Working on prototype arithmetic units and toying with the universal characteristic is AI research? He subscribed wholeheartedly to the ideographic myth; the most he would have been capable of is a machine that passes around LISP tokens.
In any case, based on the Monadology, I don't believe Leibniz would consider the creation of a godlike entity to be theologically possible.