Are there other technologies besides AGI whose development has been slowed by social stigma or backlash?
Nuclear power and certain kinds of genetic engineering (e.g. GoF research) seem like plausible candidates off the top of my head. OTOH, we still have nuclear bombs and nuclear power plants, and being a nuclear scientist or a geneticist is not widely stigmatized. Polygenic screening is apparently available to the general public, though there are some who would call the use and development of such technology immoral.
I think this is an interesting point overall, but I suspect the short-term benefits of AI will be too great to create a backlash which results in actual collective / coordinated action to slow frontier capabilities progress, even if the backlash is large. One reason is that AI capabilities research is currently a lot easier to do in private without running afoul of any existing regulations, compared to nuclear power or genetic engineering, which require experimentation on controlled materials, human test subjects, or a high biosaftey level lab.
Max—I’m working on a follow-up post about this issue.
Preview: we do have many examples of research fields (if not technologies themselves) being stigmatized so hard that they get radically slowed down in their progress. For example, the Blank Slate Left’s stigmatization of behavior genetics, evolutionary psychology, intelligence research, and sex differences research has been extremely successful in slowing down the growth and influence of these fields, deterring students and researchers from joining them, choking off government funding for them, exiling them from leading science journals and publishing houses, limiting their policy influence, etc. There are common, well-established, battle-tested activist strategies for achieving this ‘moral stigmatization of allegedly dangerous scientific fields’. These same strategies could be deployed by an anti-AI backlash (but for higher net social good than the stigmatization of these other scientific fields, IMHO).
Are there other technologies besides AGI whose development has been slowed by social stigma or backlash?
Nuclear power and certain kinds of genetic engineering (e.g. GoF research) seem like plausible candidates off the top of my head. OTOH, we still have nuclear bombs and nuclear power plants, and being a nuclear scientist or a geneticist is not widely stigmatized. Polygenic screening is apparently available to the general public, though there are some who would call the use and development of such technology immoral.
I think this is an interesting point overall, but I suspect the short-term benefits of AI will be too great to create a backlash which results in actual collective / coordinated action to slow frontier capabilities progress, even if the backlash is large. One reason is that AI capabilities research is currently a lot easier to do in private without running afoul of any existing regulations, compared to nuclear power or genetic engineering, which require experimentation on controlled materials, human test subjects, or a high biosaftey level lab.
Max—I’m working on a follow-up post about this issue.
Preview: we do have many examples of research fields (if not technologies themselves) being stigmatized so hard that they get radically slowed down in their progress. For example, the Blank Slate Left’s stigmatization of behavior genetics, evolutionary psychology, intelligence research, and sex differences research has been extremely successful in slowing down the growth and influence of these fields, deterring students and researchers from joining them, choking off government funding for them, exiling them from leading science journals and publishing houses, limiting their policy influence, etc. There are common, well-established, battle-tested activist strategies for achieving this ‘moral stigmatization of allegedly dangerous scientific fields’. These same strategies could be deployed by an anti-AI backlash (but for higher net social good than the stigmatization of these other scientific fields, IMHO).