Just for those of you who aren't aware, LessWrong is a site devoted to the cult of the "singularity." The site founder, Eliezer Yudkowsky, is a secular humanist who is probably most well-known for his Harry Potter fanfiction, "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality." His core beliefs include that the obvious goal of the human race is immortality, that it is justifiable to kill a man if it would remove a spec of dust from the eye of every other person on Earth, and that the most important thing we could possibly be doing right now is devoting all of our time developing a mathematical model of a "safe AI." The site frequently dallies with discredited ideas like Drexlerian nanobots and some on the site take absurd concepts like "Roko's Basilisk" [1] seriously.
All of this is not to discredit this specific article. And there are lots of very intelligent posters there. But I tend to take everything I read there with a massive grain of salt.
All of this is not to discredit this specific article. And there are lots of very intelligent posters there. But I tend to take everything I read there with a massive grain of salt.
[1] http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk