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Alejandro1 comments on Please vote for a title for an upcoming book - Less Wrong
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Comments (11)
The best title for me would have been the combination of two of the options: "Smarter Than Us: The Promise and Peril of Artificial Intelligence".
"Smarter than Us" is a more memorable and more descriptive title when mentioned on its own ("Our Fragile Future" looks like it could refer to global warming, nuclear war, or any other global risk). But the "Promise and Peril" subtitle conveys the focus on AI risk which is absent from "Rise of Machine Intelligence". The other two options are much worse IMO.
I also liked "Smarter Than Us", it sounds a lot like an popular science book from airport store.
I don't like other titles as they seem to rely on a fearmongering too much.
I'm torn between fully supporting this, and supporting it with one suggestion.
"Promise and Peril" has a very good emotional/narrative "oomph" to it, and may retain attention more than alternatives. However, Desrtopa makes a very good point about the target demographics, and I think something less qualifiable as "dramatic" than the word "Peril" might be preferable. Small things, but bigger names, bigger publishers and bigger money have seen books make it or break it by their name.ยน
(1. Personal conjecture and extrapolation - no formal study has been made or read to establish this belief. All I know is that publishers spend big money and lots of time on having the right title, from someone in the industry, and there's probably a reason for that, it having an effect on success of publication seeming the more plausible one.)