From Wade's A Troublesome Inheritance:
Former president Theodore Roosevelt wrote to Davenport in 1913, “We have no business to permit the perpetuation of citizens of the wrong type.” The eugenics program reached a pinnacle of acceptance when it received the imprimatur of the U.S. Supreme Court. The court was considering an appeal by Carrie Buck, a woman whom the State of Virginia wished to sterilize on the grounds that she, her mother and her daughter were mentally impaired.
In the 1927 case, known as Buck v. Bell, the Supreme Court found for the state, with only one dissent. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, writing for the majority, endorsed without reservation the eugenicists’ credo that the offspring of the mentally impaired were a menace to society. “It is better for the world,” he wrote, “if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
Eugenics, having started out as a politically impractical proposal for encouraging matches among the well-bred, had now become an accepted political movement with grim consequences for the poor and defenseless.
The first of these were sterilization programs. At the urging of Davenport and his disciples, state legislatures passed programs for sterilizing the inmates of their prisons and mental asylums. A common criterion for sterilization was feeblemindedness, an ill-defined diagnostic category that was often identified by knowledge-based questions that put the ill educated at particular disadvantage.
...Up until 1928, fewer than 9,000 people had been sterilized in the United States, even though the eugenicists estimated that up to 400,000 citizens were “feeble minded.” After the Buck v. Bell decision, the floodgates opened. By 1930, 24 states had sterilization laws on their books, and by 1940, 35,878 Americans had been sterilized or castrated.
More (#2) from A Troubled Inheritance:
...China, though for different reasons, developed the same antipathy to modern science as did the Islamic world. One problem in China was the absence of any institutions independent of the emperor. There were no universities. Such academies as existed were essentially crammers for the imperial examination system. Independent thinkers were not encouraged. When Hung-wu, the first emperor of the Ming dynasty, decided that scholars had let things get out of hand, he ordered the death penalty for 68 degree holders and 2 stud
One open question in AI risk strategy is: Can we trust the world's elite decision-makers (hereafter "elites") to navigate the creation of human-level AI (and beyond) just fine, without the kinds of special efforts that e.g. Bostrom and Yudkowsky think are needed?
Some reasons for concern include:
But if you were trying to argue for hope, you might argue along these lines (presented for the sake of argument; I don't actually endorse this argument):
The basic structure of this 'argument for hope' is due to Carl Shulman, though he doesn't necessarily endorse the details. (Also, it's just a rough argument, and as stated is not deductively valid.)
Personally, I am not very comforted by this argument because:
Obviously, there's a lot more for me to spell out here, and some of it may be unclear. The reason I'm posting these thoughts in such a rough state is so that MIRI can get some help on our research into this question.
In particular, I'd like to know: