Wow!

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/1,1282,43080,00.html

Making HAL Your Pal by Declan McCullagh (declan@wired.com)

2:00 a.m. Apr. 19, 2001 PDT

Eliezer Yudkowsky has devoted his young life to an undeniably unusual pursuit: planning for what happens when computers become far smarter than us.

[...]

One solution: Unconditional "friendliness," built into the AI as surely as our genes are coded into us.

He'll probably claim to have never read I Robot.

"I've devoted my life to this," says Yudkowsky, a self-proclaimed "genius" who lives in Atlanta and opted out of attending high school and college.

Vinge is the closest thing Singularitians have to a thought leader, spokesman and hero. He offers predictions based on measures of technological progress such as Moore's Law, and sees the Singularity as arriving between 2005 and 2030 -- though some Vinge aficionados hope the possibility of uploading their brains into an immortal computer is just around the corner.

Would that be L. Ron Vinge?

In an autobiographical essay, he writes: "I think my efforts could spell the difference between life and death for most of humanity, or even the difference between a Singularity and a lifeless, sterilized planet... I think that I can save the world, not just because I'm the one who happens to be making the effort, but because I'm the only one who can make the effort."

A God complex. Way Cool. I'll bet his father was Einstein, his mother Marie Curie. Why do I feel the name Walter Mitty should be somewhere in this picture too. Wait, here come the men in the ice cream suits! ROTFLMAO. This sure was a nice little break from CPU guts. Thanks Declan, Mike