Every generation needs a boogeyman.
My generation had Satanic Panic. Parents feared that satan worshipers were ritually abusing children. The stories fed upon themselves. Psychologists got in the business of “recovered memories”, now-discredited. Parents saw evidence where there was none, until there were more than ten thousand police reports of ritual abuse. They weren’t substantiated.
The Salem witch trials were not an anomaly. We create an enemy in times of peace. We gravitate to a cause.
AI existential risk is a really unusual candidate for this generation’s Boogeyman. Unless you’re a specific kind of nerdy techy person, the idea isn’t emotionally resonant in the same way your children being abused in a Satanic ritual is for most people. Perhaps a better candidate would be transgender people? A lot of people are freaking out over the idea of trans people abusing their children in much the same way people did with Satanic cults.
Also, for all the arguments you’ve actually said, this post just as readily applies to global warming/climate change.
You appear to be claiming that climate change is not an existential risk? The term boogeyman includes the judgement that the fears were unfounded. Climate change is a demonstrable real problem, and consequently not a boogeyman.
For something to be a boogeyman, it has to be an imagined danger that captures the fears of a lot of otherwise rational people.
No, quite the opposite, I’m saying that, given you’ve said nothing specific about AI x-risk or whatever it is you’re concerned about, the post might as well apply to climate change, which is a sign something is off/that you should be more specific since if it could apply to climate change, something is wrong because climate change is obviously a thing we should be worried about, which brings me to my next point:
What makes climate change a reasonable concern where AI x-risk isn’t?
Climate change derives from Stefhan-Boltzmann’s law together with the spectral dependence of the emissivity of various gasses. Stefhan-Boltzmann’s law has fundamental theoretical and experimental support.
This is the basis upon which climate models rest. This basis is unquestioned.
Is there a particular way this relates to current cause areas? Or wider EA? The linked article is paywalled so apologies if I’ve missed an obvious link :)
The linked nytimes article is on the Satanic Panic, the same as the linked wikipedia page. This generation’s Boogeyman is yet to be determined. People who harbor insecurities about their own causes will self-identify by downvoting this topic.