I'm pretty sure that you can't give the sequences credit for all of that. Most people here were already some breed of transhumanists, futurists, or singularitarians before they found LessWrong and read the sequences, and were probably already interested in things like life extension, space travel and colonization, and so on.
"I'm increasingly inclined to thing there should be some regulatory oversight, maybe at the national and international level just to make sure that we don't do something very foolish."
http://www.cnet.com/news/elon-musk-we-are-summoning-the-demon-with-artificial-intelligence/#ftag=CAD590a51e