Stuart Russell nails it with analogy between development of nuclear power and AI

Russell makes the following analogy in the same edge.org conversation where Elon Musk predicts a dangerous AI event in 5 to 10 years:

"We switched everything off and went home. That night, there was very little doubt in my mind that the world was headed for grief."

So wrote Leo Szilard, describing the events of March 3, 1939, when he demonstrated a neutron-induced uranium fission reaction. According to the historian Richard Rhodes, Szilard had the idea for a neutron-induced chain reaction on September 12, 1933, while crossing the road next to Russell Square in London. The previous day, Ernest Rutherford, a world authority on radioactivity, had given a "warning…to those who seek a source of power in the transmutation of atoms – such expectations are the merest moonshine."

Thus, the gap between authoritative statements of technological impossibility and the "miracle of understanding" (to borrow a phrase from Nathan Myhrvold) that renders the impossible possible may sometimes be measured not in centuries, as Rod Brooks suggests, but in hours.