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 humans care about, so it might increase its power then kill us all by accident. Friendly AI is the quest to make an AI that actually cares about humans.") Non-geeks, I suspect results like you describe.
For non-geeks, I would drop the word "intelligence", which carries too much baggage.
"Machines that can improve their ability to improve themselves can improve very quickly -- much faster than you might expect if you don't look at the math. And if a machine quickly self-improves to the point where it can change the world in radical ways, those changes might make us really unhappy or even kill us all. So we want self-improving machines to be 'Friendly' -- that is, we want them to be designed in such a way that the changes they make to themsel...
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?