The role of visionaries in the popularization of science and the acceptance of peer-reviewed science rather than State Science or Church Science might begin with the figure of Carl Sagan.

Currently the warnings concerning Strong AI from Professor Hawking present the curious phenomenon of an authority on black holes obsessing over a non-phenomenon that is unlikely to emerge as any real threat to anyone anywhere at any time. Hawking appears to have failed to see that the issue facing science is accepting hominids such as ourselves as animal rather than the emergence of disembodied and perhaps malevolent “soul-stuff.”

The recent rhetorical shift from Strong to “Deep” AI may be shown to have a strong parallel in equally ill-founded justifications for shifts in religious parlance such as have followed a variety of Creed councils in the history of revealed religions.

One curious possibility is that as Hawking has become further dependent on technology he has come to accept the vague notion of disembodied intelligent life for which there is no evidence and no plausible thought experiments based on what we know of intelligent life cetacean, avian, cephalopod or hominid.