Imagining that people could control a superintelligence, says Roman Yampolskiy, is a little like imagining that an ant can control the outcome of a football game being played around it.

Notice he did not say the ant loses. He said the ant is not in the game.

A Sterling Special Report on two hundred years of being frightened of machines. The weavers who smashed the looms and were not entirely wrong. The doctors who warned a bicycle would disturb a woman's mind. The judge who called the family automobile a house of prostitution on wheels. The senators who investigated television. The parents of 1999 who feared the Internet, and were right about more of it than we admit.

Every one of those was a tool. A loom does not understand cloth.

Then the one that may not be. Geoffrey Hinton on the only case in nature of a smarter thing  ...