Paul Graham said something similar in his essay How to Start a Startup[0], though he's referring to how driven these students are to succeed, and being surrounded by like-minded people.
> It's no coincidence that startups start around universities, because that's where smart people meet. It's not what people learn in classes at MIT and Stanford that has made technology companies spring up around them. They could sing campfire songs in the classes so long as admissions worked the same.
Very interesting. You wouldn't even need the thing you are manipulating to be attached to you. In the future you could go beyond Dr. Octopus, to pseudo-telekinesis, manipulating a mass of nanorobots.
He talks about it in a blog post [1] and uses Steve Yegge's definition [2] of "code that writes code that writes code". Ioke is homoiconic and seems to contain fexprs (functions which allow you to pass it unevaluated code to be evaluated (or not) later, thus capturing dynamic scope), like Io, and unlike most modern lisps.
Are we speaking of autonomous status as a status that is given by an authority, or a status that is achieved by a being for itself?
According to wikipedia[0], autonomy, from auto- "self" and nomos, "law", hence when combined [is] understood to mean "one who gives oneself one's own law".
Regarding intelligence, and regarding the above definition, autonomy could be considered the ability of an actor to make decisions regardless of the consequences.
Thus I would consider most animals to be autonomous in the same way a human would be considered to be so. [A deer does not ask its local government whether it can enter someone's lands.]
Just because an action is presently illegal or otherwise outside the law does not mean it always will be so, or that the action may not be executed by an AI or other being, or that the slave AI will not break free or seize power.[1][2][3]
Should an AI be strong enough to affect a change through legal means or by force, it would be [legally] able to own property.
> It's no coincidence that startups start around universities, because that's where smart people meet. It's not what people learn in classes at MIT and Stanford that has made technology companies spring up around them. They could sing campfire songs in the classes so long as admissions worked the same.
[0] http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html