They're adherents of the Singularity, a sort of nerd rapture that will occur when machines become smarter than people and begin advancing technological change on their own, eventually outpacing and - in a worst-case scenario - enslaving people before getting bored and grinding us up into fleshy pulp. This, as it happens, resembles the prospect that had the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, all worked up.
Well that's a strawman if I ever saw one. This is past the point where embellishment becomes deception.
The stuff about SIAI is pretty positive in the context of the rest, but that paragraph reaches actually quite daunting levels of not giving a shit, and I speak as someone with experience in being paid badly enough for journalism not to give a shit. I almost admire the writer's ability to wreak such epistemological violence in so few simple sentences, in a manner that it would be hard to complain effectively to her editor about. And I thought I hated tech journalism.
That the sentence fragment is technically accurate does not somehow make it not poisoning the well.
He does touch on the idea of a singleton that enslaves humanity, as one of several possible negative outcomes of our not renouncing technology and destroying modern society.
(It's been about 10 years since I read his manifesto, so I'm not very confident that I remember it accurately.)
This was syndicated to sfgate, http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/guardians-of-the-apocalypse-12152011.html is the original which has an awesome Nick Bostrom based pixel art infographic.
BTW, the author and I share the same employer, she's an email away from getting 'suggestions' if you have any really good ones.
Well, if you're going to use the phrase "nerd rapture," at least mention that there are multiple ideas about what sort of technological change would qualify as a "singularity," and the "nerd rapture" is often called the "dreaded fourth definition" :)
“There are a number of people who have knowledge in this field that estimate humanity’s chance at making it through this century at about 50 percent,” Schwall says. “Even if that number is way off and it’s one in a billion, that’s too high for me.”
Presumably he meant something different.
The first part, with its references to the Unabomber and the "nerd rapture," had me expecting a load of criticism of SIAI. The amount of respect it got in the second half was surprising. Anecdotal evidence that SIAI is doing a good job of setting itself up as the respectable, sane, not-Ray-Kurzweil version of existential risk advocacy.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/12/19/BUFU1MD58T.DTL&type=printable