kgalias comments on Superintelligence Reading Group 2: Forecasting AI - Less Wrong

10 Post author: KatjaGrace 23 September 2014 01:00AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (109)

Sort By: Best

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: kgalias 23 September 2014 06:51:29PM 1 point [-]

What topic are you comparing it with?

When you specify that, I think the relevant question is: does the topic have an equivalent of a Terminator franchise?

Comment author: KatjaGrace 25 September 2014 09:19:30PM 1 point [-]

War is taken fairly seriously in reporting, though there are a wide variety of war-related movies in different styles.

Comment author: kgalias 26 September 2014 01:14:13PM 3 points [-]

OK, but war happens in real life. For most people, the only time they hear of AI is in Terminator-like movies.

I'd rather compare it to some other technological topic, but which doesn't have a relevant franchise in popular culture.

Comment author: KatjaGrace 28 September 2014 06:28:32PM * 3 points [-]

To be clear, you are saying that a thing will seem frivolous if it does have a relevant franchise, but hasn't happened in real life?

Some other technological topics that hadn't happened in real life when people became concerned about them:

Nuclear weapons, had The World Set Free, though I'm not sure how well known it was (may have been seen as frivolous by most at first - I'm not sure, but by the time there were serious projects to build them I think not)
Extreme effects from climate change, e.g. massive sea level rise, freezing of Northern Europe, no particular popular culture franchise (not very frivolous)
Recombinant DNA technology, the public's concern was somewhat motivated by The Andromeda Strain) (not frivolous I think).

Evidence seems mixed.

Comment author: kgalias 29 September 2014 11:11:53PM 1 point [-]

To be clear, you are saying that a thing will seem frivolous if it does have a relevant franchise, but hasn't happened in real life?

Yes, that was my (tentative) claim.

We would need to know whether the examples were seen as frivolous after they came into being, but before the technology started being used.