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passive_fist comments on MIRI strategy - Less Wrong
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Convincing people in Greenpeace that an UFAI presents a risk that they should care about has it's own dangers. There a risk that you associate caring about UFAI with luddites.
If you get a broad public to care about the topic without really understanding it, it gets political. It makes sense to push the idea in a way, where a smart MIT kid doesn't hear the first time about the dangers of UFAI from a luddite but from someone that he can intellectually respect.
Is "bad publicity" worse than "good publicity" here? If strong AI became a hot political topic, it would raise awareness considerably. The fiction surrounding strong AI should bias the population towards understanding it as a legitimate threat. Each political party in turn will have their own agenda, trying to attach whatever connotations they want to the issue, but if the public at large started really worrying about uFAI, that's kind of the goal here.
Based on my (subjective and anecdotal, I'll admit) personal experiences, I think it would be bad. Look at climate change.
Is there something wrong with climate change in the world today? Yes, it's hotly debated by millions of people, a super-majority of them being entirely unqualified to even have an opinion, but is this a bad thing? Would less public awareness of the issue of climate change have been better? What differences would there be? Would organizations be investing in "green" and alternative energy if not for the publicity surrounding climate change?
It's easy to look back after the fact and say, "The market handled it!" But the truth is that the publicity and the corresponding opinions of thousands of entrepreneurs is part of that market.
Looking at the two markets:
The latter just seems a ton less likely to mitigate uFAI risks than the former.
The failure mode that I'm most concerned about is overreaction followed by a backlash of dismissal. If that happened, the end result would be far worse than obscurity.