A brief history of AI executives calling for regulation

Over the past few days, a lot of people who stand to make a lot of money from AI all publicly agreed that it’s time to make everyone slow down before we lose control — including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Google DeepMind cofounder Demis Hassabis, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and X CEO Elon Musk. When people who profit from something declare that it’s dangerous and needs to be regulated, there’s always reason to be skeptical. But whatever their reason, this is far from the first time AI thought leaders have sounded the alarm. Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution prompted author Samuel Butler to warn about intelligent self-replicating machines replacing humans back in 1863 — and in his follow-up 1872 book Erewhon, he describes visiting a fictional society that has already regulated machines out of existence to avoid humanity’s collapse. Computing pioneer Alan Turing famously warned in a 1951 lecture that artificial intelligence would “meet with great opposition,” because undying machines “would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers” and would eventually “take control.” Calls for intervention, too, aren’t new. In 2000, Sun Microsystems cofounder and chief scientist…