Wendell Wallach, A Dangerous Master: How to Keep Technology from Slipping Beyond Our Control ( New York: Basic Books, 2015) ("In the case of AI, the hype machine ritually exaggerates the importance of each step forward, such as IBM's Deep Blue beating the chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov or IBM's Watson winning at the TV quiz show Jeopardy. Both victory were truly noteworthy, and yet each revealed new layers of complexity that must be surmounted for full AI to be realized." "In the realm of human enhancements, the remarkable feat of a paraplegic maneuvering his wheelchair with thought alone gets exaggerated into proof that minds and machines will soon be fully integrated. Hype, hope, and wishful thinking overwhelm any realistic appraisal of the difficult thresholds that lie ahead. The media discovered that innovations accompanied by exaggerated claims attract views, but eyes roll and the audience switches channels when critics share their doubts. In the U.S., challenges to the conventional wisdom that we can achieve anything we set our minds to are treated as cynical defilements of a revealed truth. In this narrative, the power of positive thinking always prevails." "Regardless of the slow pace of change in realizing major enhancements, and regardless of the fact that new layers if complexity make it unclear how far off it all is, both the transhumanists and their critics have bought into the same basic narrative. Scientific mastery, both believe, will soon permit wholesale alteration of the human genome, mind, and body. The upshot will be easy access to superior skills, soon followed by new races of cyborgs and techno sapiens whose capabilities will far exceed those of the average person live today. The sense of inevitability which accompanies these projections can be energy-sapping for people who feel that the future will not need us--at least not as we currently are. Only time can reveal whether skepticism with respect to the transhuman dream represents a failure of imagination or if the dream itself epitomizes imagination run wild. Even should extraordinary enhancements be possible, there is nothing inevitable about the future course of humanity. Plenty of inflection points will appear for slowing or altering the trajectory of technologies that might be adopted for enhancement purposes, We do have a say. Inflection points lie on the horizon and a few are already perceivable." Id. at 163-164.).
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, introduced by Ursula K. Le Guin, illustrated by Finn Dean (London: The Folio Society, 2013) ("Not philosophers, but fret-sawyers and stamp collectors compose the backbone of society." Id. at 4.).
