Depends on your definition of "the public". Most people in the world population have certainly never heard of "the singularity" and while they may have heard about the Hollywood concept of "AI" (which actually portraits UFAI pretty well, except that the Hollywood versions are normally stupider-than-humans) they know nothing about AI as it exists or might exist in reality.
More to the point, very few people in the world have thought seriously about either topic, or ever will. I expect that most people will accept a version deriving from something presented in the media. Among the things the media might present, "mad science" ranks high: it's likely they'll call it "science" (or technology/engineering), and they will surely present it as impossible and/or undesirable, which makes it mad.
Mad science, even Evil Mad Science, is really not so bad and may be a mark of respect. Contrast it with the popular image of Evil Science, like Nazi scientists doing human experiments. Or Unnatural Science, the Frankenstein meme (which the public image of cryonics barely skirts).
The other image the SIngularity is tainted with in the public mind is, of course, "the rapture of the nerds": atheist geeks reinventing silly religion and starting cults (like LW). In other words, madness without the science. Mad science would be an upgrade to the SIngularity's public image right now. Mad science is something people take a little seriously, because it just might work, or at least leave a really big hole.
Test my hypothesis! Try to explain the concept of a fooming AI-driven singularity to anyone who hasn't heard of it in depth, in 5 minutes - more than most people will spend on listening to the media or thinking about the subject before reaching a conclusion. See if you can, even deliberately, make them reach any conclusion other than "mad scientist" or "science-religious cultist" or "just mad".
Test my hypothesis! Try to explain the concept of a fooming AI-driven singularity to anyone who hasn't heard of it in depth, in 5 minutes - more than most people will spend on listening to the media or thinking about the subject before reaching a conclusion. See if you can, even deliberately, make them reach any conclusion other than "mad scientist" or "science-religious cultist" or "just mad".
Explaining it to geeks is easy enough IME. ("There's no reason an AI would be anything like a human or care about anything huma...
Taken from some old comments of mine that never did get a satisfactory answer.
1) One of the justifications for CEV was that extrapolating from an American in the 21st century and from Archimedes of Syracuse should give similar results. This seems to assume that change in human values over time is mostly "progress" rather than drift. Do we have any evidence for that, except saying that our modern values are "good" according to themselves, so whatever historical process led to them must have been "progress"?
2) How can anyone sincerely want to build an AI that fulfills anything except their own current, personal volition? If Eliezer wants the the AI to look at humanity and infer its best wishes for the future, why can't he task it with looking at himself and inferring his best idea to fulfill humanity's wishes? Why must this particular thing be spelled out in a document like CEV and not left to the mysterious magic of "intelligence", and what other such things are there?