[ExI] AI doomerism isn’t new. Meet the original alarmist: Norbert Wiener.

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AI doomerism isn’t new. Meet the original alarmist: Norbert Wiener

He warned that AI could lead to humanity's destruction decades before
Geoffrey Hinton and Eliezer Yudkowsky began sounding the alarm.
MIT Archives / Wikimedia Commons   Norbert Wiener
By Louis Anslow    September 11, 2025

<https://www.freethink.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-doomerism>
Quotes:
Long before Geoffrey Hinton and Eliezer Yudkowsky sounded warnings
about artificial intelligence, there was Dr. Norbert Wiener in the
1950s and ‘60s.
Wiener was a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence or, as he
called it, cybernetics. His groundbreaking work laid the foundations
that our current AI boom is built atop of, and his concerns about AI
have no doubt influenced those being voiced by his successors in the
field today.

In the second draft, Wiener would cite old fables, such as genies in
bottles, that he said contained a powerful lesson: If we have the
power to realize our wishes, “we are more likely to use it wrongly
than to use it rightly, more likely to use it stupidly than to use it
intelligently.” His prediction, one familiar in the current dialog
around AI: “The machines will do what we ask them to do and not what
we ought to ask them to do.”
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