This wonderful post by UCSC historian Benjamin Breen looks to the time just before the conception of the ‘artificial intelligence’:

When I returned to the original source, I was struck by how prescient Mead was in discussing not just the simulation hypothesis, but also the question of self-improving AI systems. Keep in mind, although her interview was from 1968, she’s discussing events from the 1948-1950 period, when digital computers were just a few years old.

Turns out those pre-AI folks knew exactly what we’d be facing into.

Read it all here.