[gotorazor]

This is kinda how history of ideas work. People just kind of think they think and know things independently from within themselves or something.

Historians who study the origins of idea traces them back and make connections to thoughts and ideas of the past. Often, the inheritors of those ideas knows nothing of how they get them and think themselves clever for coming up with them all by themselves.

[nearbuy]

This is unfalsifiable speculation though. I could make that claim about anyone (eg, I could say actually it was H. G. Wells planted the seeds of techno-optimism in the present day AI community) and you would have no way to prove me wrong.

Remove Margaret Mead from the timeline and the AI camps today would probably be the exact same. Those are basically the two options with anything in life that's both useful and dangerous: optimism or pessimism, hope or fear.

[tgv]

True, but that trace here is missing. There is no link apart from "Mead said something vaguely utopian", and that doesn't even seem specific for technology. In 1939, technology was not the most threatening thing.

[BlueTemplar]

You're joking, right ? By WW1 already, technology had changed war to the point that it became extremely economically destructive :

https://www.wearethemighty.com/popular/world-war-i-battlefie...