From Sabin's The Bet:
To make sure The Population Bomb would reach the widest possible audience, Ehrlich paid his twelve-year-old daughter ten dollars to read the draft manuscript and flag any difficult passages.
And:
Ehrlich’s fear of overpopulation and famine reflected broader elite concerns in the mid-1960s. With the world population growing from 2.5 billion people in 1950 to 3.35 billion in 1965, many commentators questioned whether the planet could sustain the growing number of people. The New Republic announced in 1965 that “world population has passed food supply. The famine has started.” The magazine predicted that even “dramatic counter-measures” could not reverse the situation. A “world calamity” would strike within the decade. World hunger, the magazine editors wrote, would be the “single most important fact in the final third of the 20th Century.” US Ambassador to India Chester Bowles concurred, telling a Senate subcommittee in June 1965 that the approaching world famine threatened “the most colossal catastrophe in history.” Starting in January 1968, around the time that Ehrlich was writing The Population Bomb, a group calling itself the “Campaign to Check the Population Explosion” started running full-page advertisements in the Washington Post and the New York Times. The imagery was apocalyptic. One advertisement showed a large stopwatch and announced that someone “dies from starvation” every 8.6 seconds. “World population has already outgrown world food supply,” the advertisement declared. Another advertisement showed the picture of a baby under the headline “Threat to Peace,” warning that “skyrocketing population growth may doom the world we live in.” A third pictured Earth as a bomb about to explode — with population control the only way to defuse the threat.
More (#3) from The Bet:
The stark clash of perspectives that the bet represented suited the divisive environmental politics of the early 1990s. Regulations to protect endangered species, policies to slow global warming, and efforts to protect national forests and rangelands now sharply split Democrats and Republicans. Whereas in the 1970s, major environmental legislation had passed with bipartisan support, by the early 1990s, where a politician stood on environmental policies served as a litmus test of ideology and political affiliation.
One open question in AI risk strategy is: Can we trust the world's elite decision-makers (hereafter "elites") to navigate the creation of human-level AI (and beyond) just fine, without the kinds of special efforts that e.g. Bostrom and Yudkowsky think are needed?
Some reasons for concern include:
But if you were trying to argue for hope, you might argue along these lines (presented for the sake of argument; I don't actually endorse this argument):
The basic structure of this 'argument for hope' is due to Carl Shulman, though he doesn't necessarily endorse the details. (Also, it's just a rough argument, and as stated is not deductively valid.)
Personally, I am not very comforted by this argument because:
Obviously, there's a lot more for me to spell out here, and some of it may be unclear. The reason I'm posting these thoughts in such a rough state is so that MIRI can get some help on our research into this question.
In particular, I'd like to know: