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).
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).