Darwin Among the Machines (1863) (nzetc.victoria.ac.nz)

It's sometimes amazing to see how history rhymes. At the dawn of the industrial age people had similar reservations and worries about thinking machines just like the AGI worries we see today.

Side note: This essay was inspiration for the destruction of the AGI that takes place in Frank Herbert's Dune series (the Butlerian Jihad).

“The views of machinery which we are thus feebly indicating will suggest the solution of one of the greatest and most mysterious questions of the day. We refer to the question: What sort of creature man’s next successor in the supremacy of the earth is likely to be. We have often heard this debated; but it appears to us that we are ourselves creating our own successors; we are daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their physical organisation; we are daily giving them greater power and supplying by all sorts of ingenious contrivances that self-regulating, self-acting power which will be to them what intellect has been to the human race. In the course of ages we shall find ourselves the inferior race. Inferior in power, inferior in that moral quality of self-control, we shall look up to them as the acme of all that the best and wisest man can ever dare to aim at.”