There's a big Hollywood movie coming out with an apocalyptic Singularity-like story, called Transcendence. (IMDB, Wiki, official site) With an A-list cast and big budget, I contend this movie is the front-runner to be 2014's most significant influence on discussions of superintelligence outside specialist circles. Anyone hoping to influence those discussions should start preparing some talking points.
I don't see anybody here agree with me on this. The movie has been briefly discussed on LW when it was first announced in March 2013, but since then, only the trailer (out since December) has been mentioned. MIRI hasn't published a word about it. This amazes me. We have three months till millions of people who never considered superintelligence are going to start thinking about it - is nobody bothering to craft a response to the movie yet? Shouldn't there be something that lazy journalists, given the job to write about this movie, can find?
Because if there isn't, they'll dismiss the danger of AI like Erik Sofge already did in an early piece about the movie for Popular Science, and nudge their readers to do so too. And that'd be a shame, wouldn't it?
Something to be aware of is that, as with the novel Zendegi (which had the "benign superintelligence bootstrap project" and "overpowering falsehood dot com"), there are likely to be some specific allusions to transhumanist communities, although the visual media supports more allusive mechanisms based on sounds and appearances and emotional/social gestalts. The allusions in Zendegi were quite ungenerous. I'm not sure what kind of critical or positive environment would be good in terms of their expected positive or negative world outcomes, but I imagine that being able to respond to them could be important for the organization and for people.
Off the top of my head I can see stuff just in the trailer and brief summary.
The protagonist's name is "Will Caster" which resonates a bit with the way futurists semi-often give themselves names that can function as priming/identity hacks like Max More, Will Newsome, FM-2030, etc.
There will almost certainly be scenes that try to replicate the vibe of a Singularity Summit. The trailer has some "guy with big wavy hair standing on a stage speaking to a packed audience" visuals but I don't know how much other stuff might come through.
The uploadee's love interest will be played by Rebecca Hall who reminded me a bit of Julia Galef.
I wonder if memes pairing an image from the movie and an image from RL with a caption would tend to be "good" or "bad"?
The guy talking on a stage is probably much more TED (and, to me, reminescent of the movie Sneakers), than any domain-specific conference.