person
Samuel Butler
Victorian novelist; proto-AI-risk thinker (1835–1902)
English writer whose 1863 essay 'Darwin Among the Machines' made the earliest sustained argument that machines would out-evolve humans and should be destroyed. Appears here for historical continuity.
Profile
expertise
External-domain expert
Recognised expert outside AI (philosophy, economics, biology, journalism) who weighs in on AI consequences from that vantage.
Victorian writer (1835–1902). 'Erewhon' (1872) anticipates machine consciousness; cited as the earliest treatment of AI x-risk. Not a technical contributor, historical reference.
recognition
Field-leading
Widely known inside the AI and AI-safety community. Appears repeatedly in top venues, podcasts, or governance forums. Not a household name to outsiders.
Canonical Victorian author; cited in AI history.
vintage
Pioneer
Defining figure from before 1980. Cybernetics, formal computation, early AI laboratories. Their concept of intelligence is not bound to neural networks.
1835–1902. Erewhon 1872 anticipates machine consciousness, the earliest entry in this corpus.
Hand-classified. See the board for the criteria and the full grid.
Strategy positions
Abandon superintelligenceendorses
Reject superintelligence as a goal entirely; narrow AI onlyArgued in 1863, roughly 160 years before the Pause letter, that humanity should destroy intelligent machines before they displaced humans.
“Our opinion is that war to the death should be instantly proclaimed against them. Every machine of every sort should be destroyed by the well-wisher of his species.”
Closest strategy neighbours
by jaccard overlapOther people whose strategy tags overlap with Samuel Butler's. Overlap is on tag identity, not stance; opposites can show up if they reference the same tags.
Record last updated 2026-04-24.