Ok so I'm in the target audience for this. I'm an AI researcher that doesn't take AI risk seriously and doesn't understand the obsession this site has with AI x-risk. But the thing is I've read all the arguments here and I find them unconvincing. They demonstrate a lack of rigor and a naïve under appreciation of the difficulty of making anything work in production at all, much less out smart the human race.
If you want AI people to take you seriously, don't just throw more verbiage at them. There is enough of that already. Show them working code. Not friendly AI code -- they don't give a damn about that -- but an actual evil AI that could conceivably have been created by accident and actually have cataclysmic consequences. Because from where I sit that is a unicorn, and I stopped believing in unicorns a long time ago.
https://blog.openai.com/faulty-reward-functions/
[edit]This probably deserves a longer response. From my perspective, all of the pieces of the argument for AI risk exist individually, but don't yet exist in combination. (If all of the pieces existed in combination, we'd already be dead.) And so when someone says "show me the potential risk," it's unclear which piece they don't believe in yet, or which combination they think won't work.
That is, it seems to me that if you believe 1) AIs will take actions that score well on their reward functions, 2)...
There have been a few attempts to reach out to broader audiences in the past, but mostly in very politically/ideologically loaded topics.
After seeing several examples of how little understanding people have about the difficulties in creating a friendly AI, I'm horrified. And I'm not even talking about a farmer on some hidden ranch, but about people who should know about these things, researchers, software developers meddling with AI research, and so on.
What made me write this post, was a highly voted answer on stackexchange.com, which claims that the danger of superhuman AI is a non-issue, and that the only way for an AI to wipe out humanity is if "some insane human wanted that, and told the AI to find a way to do it". And the poster claims to be working in the AI field.
I've also seen a TEDx talk about AIs. The talker didn't even hear about the paperclip maximizer, and the talk was about the dangers presented by the AIs as depicted in the movies, like the Terminator, where an AI "rebels", but we can hope that AIs would not rebel as they cannot feel emotion, so we should hope the events depicted in such movies will not happen, and all we have to do is for ourselves to be ethical and not deliberately write malicious AI, and then everything will be OK.
The sheer and mind-boggling stupidity of this makes me want to scream.
We should find a way to increase public awareness of the difficulty of the problem. The paperclip maximizer should become part of public consciousness, a part of pop culture. Whenever there is a relevant discussion about the topic, we should mention it. We should increase awareness of old fairy tales with a jinn who misinterprets wishes. Whatever it takes to ingrain the importance of these problems into public consciousness.
There are many people graduating every year who've never heard about these problems. Or if they did, they dismiss it as a non-issue, a contradictory thought experiment which can be dismissed without a second though:
We don't want our future AI researches to start working with such a mentality.
What can we do to raise awareness? We don't have the funding to make a movie which becomes a cult classic. We might start downvoting and commenting on the aforementioned stackexchange post, but that would not solve much if anything.