One thing that might help change the opinion of people about friendly AI is to make some progress on it. For example, if Eliezer has had any interesting ideas about how to do it in the last five years of thinking about it, it could be helpful to communicate them.
A case that is credible to a large number of people needs to be made that this is a high-probability near-term problem. Without that it's just a scary sci-fi movie, and frankly there are scarier sci-fi movie concepts out there (e.g. bioterror). Making an analogy with a nuclear bomb is simply not an effective argument. People were not persuaded about global warming with a "greenhouse" analogy. That sort of thing creates a sort of dim level of awareness, but "AI might kill us" is not some new idea; everybody is already aware of that -- just like they are aware that a meteor might wipe us out, aliens might invade, or an engineered virus or new life form could kill us all. Which of those things get attention from policy-makers and their advisers, and why?
Besides the weakness of relying on analogy, this analogy isn't even all that good -- it takes concerted and advanced targeted technical dedication to make a nuclear FOOM fast enough to "explode". It's a reasonably simple matter to make it FOOM slowly and provide us with electrical power to enhance our standard of living.
If the message is "don't build Skynet", funding agencies will say "ok, we won't fund Skynet" and AI researchers will say "I'm not building Skynet". If somebody is working on a dangerous project, name names and point fingers.
GIve a chain of reasoning. If some of you rationalists have concluded a significant probability of an AI FOOM coming soon, all you have to do is explicate the reasoning and probabilities involved. If your conclusion is justified, if your ratiocination is sound, you must be able to explicate it in a convincing way, or else how are you so confident in it?
This isn't really an "awareness" issue -- because it's scary and in some sense reasonable it makes a great story, thus hour after hour of TV, movie blockbusters stretching back through decades, novel after novel after novel.
Make a convincing case and people will start to be convinced by it. I know you think you have already, but you haven't.
One thing that might help change the opinion of people about friendly AI is to make some progress on it. For example, if Eliezer has had any interesting ideas about how to do it in the last five years of thinking about it, it could be helpful to communicate them.
I disagree strongly. World atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration is still increasing, indeed the rate at which it is increasing is increasing (i.e CO2 output per annum is increasing), so antiprogress is being made upon the global warming problem - yet people still think it's worth putting mo...
Michael Annisimov has put up a website called Terminator Salvation: Preventing Skynet, which will host a series of essays on the topic of human-friendly artificial intelligence. Three rather good essays are already up there, including an old classic by Eliezer. The association with a piece of fiction is probably unhelpful, but the publicity surrounding the new terminator film is probably worth it.
What rational strategies can we employ to maximize the impact of such a site, or of publicity for serious issues in general? Most people who read this site will probably not do anything about it, or will find some reason to not take the content of these essays seriously. I say this because I have personally spoken to a lot of clever people about the creation of human-friendly artificial intelligence, and almost everyone finds some reason to not do anything about the problem, even if that reason is "oh, ok, that's interesting. Anyway, about my new car... ".
What is the reason underlying people's indifference to these issues? My personal suspicion is that most people make decisions in their lives by following what everyone else does, rather than by performing a genuine rational analysis.
Consider the rise in social acceptability of making small personal sacrifices and political decisions based on eco-friendliness and your carbon footprint. Many people I know have become very enthusiastic for recycling used food containers and for unplugging appliances that use trivial amounts of power (for example unused phone chargers and electrical equipment on standby). The real reason that people do these things is that they have become socially accepted factoids. Most people in this world, even in this country, lack the mental faculties and knowledge to understand and act upon an argument involving notions of per capita CO2 emissions; instead they respond, at least in my understanding, to the general climate of acceptable opinion, and to opinion formers such as the BBC news website, which has a whole section for "science and environment". Now, I don't want to single out environmentalism as the only issue where people form their opinions based upon what is socially acceptable to believe, or to claim that reducing our greenhouse gas emissions is not a worthy cause.
Another great example of socially acceptable factoids (though probably a less serious one) is the detox industry - see, for example, this Times article. I quote:
Anyone who takes a serious interest in changing the world would do well to understand the process whereby public opinion as a whole changes on some subject, and attempt to influence that process in an optimal way. How strongly is public opinion correlated with scientific opinion, for example? Particular attention should be paid to the history of the environmentalist movement. See, for example, McKay's Sustainable energy without the hot air for a great example of a rigorous quantitative analysis in support of various ways of balancing our energy supply and demand, and for a great take on the power of socially accepted factoids, see Phone chargers - the Truth.
So I submit to the wisdom of the Less Wrong groupmind - what can we do to efficiently change the opinion of millions of people on important issues such as freindly AI? Is a site such as the one linked above going to have the intended effect, or is it going to fall upon rationally-deaf ears? What practical advice could we give to Michael and his contributors that would maximize the impact of the site? What other intervantions might be a better use of his time?
Edit: Thanks to those who made constructive suggestions for this post. It has been revised - R