Yes, that’s an important nuance I discuss at the end of the essay. These arguments don’t apply to the same degree to rationalists like Bostrom or Yudkowsky, industry leaders like Altman, Hassabis, Pichai, or Nadella, or pure AI researchers like Bengio and Hinton.

Yet, I think it applies to Hinton as a creator of the technology and now as a believer that AI might become more intelligent than us shortly despite his own admission that he’s very uncertain of the future. That sounds like an emotional reaction to the unknown to me, mixed with a form of self-responsibility and self-importance (he likes to quote Oppenheimer, for instance, as a role model).