Good: the intelligence explosion
In volume 6 of Advances in Computers, which the publisher dates to 1966, Irving John Good of Trinity College, Oxford published 'Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine'. He defined an ultraintelligent machine as one that far surpasses any man in all intellectual activities and reasoned that it could design still better machines.
Why it matters
This is where the 'intelligence explosion' comes from, and the phrase still quoted: the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention man need ever make, 'provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control'. The condition at the end of the sentence is already the question of control that Bostrom would make the subject of a book half a century later.
Good wrote as an advocate, not a warner: the paper opens with 'The survival of man depends on the early construction of an ultraintelligent machine', and most of it concerns a 'subassembly' theory after Hebb, memory, retrieval and meaning. Control takes one paragraph on page 33, where Good also remarks that the point is seldom made outside science fiction. Affiliation: Trinity College, Oxford and the Atlas Computer Laboratory, Chilton. Date: the publisher and Crossref give 1966; the work is usually cited as 1965, but the volume's copyright page is closed, so the record stands on the publisher's year. It grew from talks at UCLA (October 1962) and the IEEE winter meetings (January 1963). The text was read from a scan without a text layer on Richard Sutton's site.