Peter Singer, one of the world’s most influential public intellectuals, and co-author, independent Warsaw-based ethicist Agata Sagan, have published an article called “Rights for Robots?” at the Project Syndicate website. Project Syndicate is “the world’s foremost provider of original commentaries, bringing distinguished voices from around the planet to readers of 432 newspapers in 150 countries.” Other contributors to the site include Bjørn Lomborg, George Soros, Mikhail Gorbachev, and other distinguished persons. Here is the excerpt from the article that mentions SIAI and Eliezer Yudkowsky:

A more ominous question is familiar from novels and movies: Will we have to defend our civilization against intelligent machines of our own creation? Some consider the development of superhuman artificial intelligence inevitable, and expect it to happen no later than 2070. They refer to this moment as “the singularity,” and see it as a world-changing event.

Eliezer Yudkowsky, one of the founders of The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, believes that singularity will lead to an “intelligence explosion” as super-intelligent machines design even more intelligent machines, with each generation repeating this process. The more cautious Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence has set up a special panel to study what it calls “the potential for loss of human control of computer-based intelligences.”

The panel found that the probability of an intelligence explosion was not great. But see Steve Rayhawk’s analysis for reasons why the chance they would find otherwise would indeed be quite low.