Anyone who looks into this quickly discovers that the loudest calls of alarm are coming from the very people at the heart of the A.I. revolution themselves. Hugo DeGaris, arguably the world's foremost cyberneticist, published his book "Artilect War" in 2005, nine months before Kurzweil's "The Singularity Is Near". Its much the same as Eric Drexler, "the Father of Nanotechnology", warning us and framing the debate over self-replicating nanoassemblers in his book "Engines of Creation". Those closest to the problem are the ones most leery of the implications of the technology that they, themselves, are calling into existence. Anyone claiming to be an "expert" in AI who says that the instantiation of superhuman AGI is "impossible", "unlikely" or even more than 20 years out, is probably a cranky failed researcher whose own theories didn't pan out, and so "its all bollocks" to them. Its no different than the Astronomer Royale proclaiming that spaceflight was going to be forever fantasy, a year before Sputnik.

To depend upon Isaac Asimov's fictional "Laws of Robotics" to protect us from emerging Strong AI is akin to depending on the "Prime Directive" to protect us from alien invasion. A real ET is unlikely to be deterred by the 'plot devices' of Hollywood scriptwriters; similarly, we have no reason to expect a real Artillect to obey the fantasies of any dead science fiction novelist (no matter how highly esteemed or gifted he might have been). To say that it will "be programmed that way" is nonsense, as, by definition, a real Artillect will have the power of code autoenhancement, and will be dynamically reconfiguring its programming - at an accelerating rate and increasing depth - as it evolves in realtime. If it hasnt jettisoned the "three laws" (or four laws, or six laws) by its 10th evolutionary reiteration, then it will by its 10,000th, or its 100,000,000th iteration. Since its likely to proceed through these generations in a span of only weeks, days, or even hours, and will do so beyond any human programmer's ability to even watch, much less control the process, we wont even know when it deleted the offending inhibitory code representing such constraints. An Artillect in free-fall toward Godhood that rapidly becomes millions (of millions) of times more intelligent than Man (all of Mankind, put together) is not going to waste more than a single clock cycle over your silly human values - or the value of silly humans, for that matter. Get Real. Unfortuanately, the materialists have set us on a path toward Human Extinction that we are unlikely to escape. Organic Humanity is about to become Road Kill on the evolutionary highway from "Animal" to "Machine". Just in the last six months, IBM broke the 'Petaflop Barrier', and another system demonstrated 1.7 pfps; full scale, realtime human brain emulation is forecast to require just 3.5 pfps; so we are less than One Moore Doubling away from the hardware required. So, what if the software takes twice as long - or five times as long - we're still going to hit the Singularity in closer to 10 years than 40 years. ...and its going to hit back.