If you speak to a stranger about your worries of unaligned AI, they’ll think you’re insane (and watch too many sci-fi films).
I’m not so sure this is true. In my own experience, a correct explanation of the problem with unaligned AI makes sense to almost everyone with some minimum of reasoning skill. Although this is anecdotal, I would not be surprised if an actual survey among “strangers” would show this too.
Commenting on your general point, I think the reason is that most people’s sense of when AGI could plausibly happen is “in the far future”, which makes it psychologically unremarkable at this point.
Something like extinction (even if literal extinction is unlikely) from climate change, although possibly further off in time, might feel closer to a lot of people because climate change is already killing people.
Similarly, I find that almost everyone in my social circle agrees that “extremely advanced AI could be extremely dangerous.” Then I mention that way more AI researchers focus on AI capabilities than long-term safety (based on the AI section in the “official” EA introduction), and people continue to nod. They certainly don’t think I’m insane.
I’m not so sure this is true. In my own experience, a correct explanation of the problem with unaligned AI makes sense to almost everyone with some minimum of reasoning skill. Although this is anecdotal, I would not be surprised if an actual survey among “strangers” would show this too.
Commenting on your general point, I think the reason is that most people’s sense of when AGI could plausibly happen is “in the far future”, which makes it psychologically unremarkable at this point.
Something like extinction (even if literal extinction is unlikely) from climate change, although possibly further off in time, might feel closer to a lot of people because climate change is already killing people.
Similarly, I find that almost everyone in my social circle agrees that “extremely advanced AI could be extremely dangerous.” Then I mention that way more AI researchers focus on AI capabilities than long-term safety (based on the AI section in the “official” EA introduction), and people continue to nod. They certainly don’t think I’m insane.