Part of the “it’s not like Terminator” line is a response to people misremembering the plot of the movie. From the Dylan Matthews VOX article you linked:
What did these folks think would happen — was some company going to build Skynet and manufacture Terminator robots to slaughter anyone who stood in their way? It felt like a sci-fi fantasy, not a real problem.
Defense network computers. New… powerful… hooked into everything, trusted to run it all. They say it got smart, a new order of intelligence”. According to Reese, Skynet “saw all humans as a threat; not just the ones on the other side” and “decided our fate in a microsecond: extermination”.
In Matthews’ recollection of the movie, the real villain of Terminator was an evil corporation bent on world domination, with Skynet being their means to that end. In the actual movie, Skynet was supposed to make defense systems more reliable, and it became self-aware and misaligned by accident.
So objecting to the Terminator comparison might be meant as a way to downplay the Evil Corporations narrative and center the story on misalignment as a technical problem, one that happens by miscoordination and by accident. You could also try to do that by pointing out what Terminator’s actually about, but then you’re maybe doing a little more movie criticism than you want to in a presentation on AI risk.
Part of the “it’s not like Terminator” line is a response to people misremembering the plot of the movie. From the Dylan Matthews VOX article you linked:
Here’s the description of Skynet from the wikipedia article:
In Matthews’ recollection of the movie, the real villain of Terminator was an evil corporation bent on world domination, with Skynet being their means to that end. In the actual movie, Skynet was supposed to make defense systems more reliable, and it became self-aware and misaligned by accident.
So objecting to the Terminator comparison might be meant as a way to downplay the Evil Corporations narrative and center the story on misalignment as a technical problem, one that happens by miscoordination and by accident. You could also try to do that by pointing out what Terminator’s actually about, but then you’re maybe doing a little more movie criticism than you want to in a presentation on AI risk.