The historical figures who basically saw it (George Eliot 1879: “will the creatures who are to transcend and finally supersede us be steely organisms [...] performing with infallible exactness more than everything that we have performed with a slovenly approximativeness and self-defeating inaccuracy?”; Turing 1951: “At some stage therefore we should have to expect the machines to take control”) seem to have done so in the spirit of speculating about the cosmic process. The idea of coming up with a plan to solve the problem is an additional act of audacity; that’s not really how things have ever worked so far. (People make plans about their own lives, or their own businesses; at most, a single country; no one plans world-scale evolutionary transitions.)
I’m tempted to call this a meta-ethical failure. Fatalism, universal moral realism, and just-world intuitions seem to be the underlying implicit hueristics or principals that would cause this “cosmic process” thought-blocker.
The historical figures who basically saw it (George Eliot 1879: “will the creatures who are to transcend and finally supersede us be steely organisms [...] performing with infallible exactness more than everything that we have performed with a slovenly approximativeness and self-defeating inaccuracy?”; Turing 1951: “At some stage therefore we should have to expect the machines to take control”) seem to have done so in the spirit of speculating about the cosmic process. The idea of coming up with a plan to solve the problem is an additional act of audacity; that’s not really how things have ever worked so far. (People make plans about their own lives, or their own businesses; at most, a single country; no one plans world-scale evolutionary transitions.)
I’m tempted to call this a meta-ethical failure. Fatalism, universal moral realism, and just-world intuitions seem to be the underlying implicit hueristics or principals that would cause this “cosmic process” thought-blocker.