[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.