I think I mostly lean towards general agreement with this take, but with several caveats as noted by others.
On the one hand, there are clearly important distinctions to be made between actual AI risk scenarios and Terminator scenarios. On the other hand, in my experience people pattern-matching to the Terminator usually doesn’t make anything seem less plausible to them, at least as far as I could tell. Most people don’t seem to have any trouble separating the time travel and humanoid robot parts from the core concern of misaligned AI, especially if you immediately point out the differences. In fact, in my experience, at least, the whole Terminator thing seems to just make AI risks feel more viscerally real and scary rather than being some sort of curious abstract thought experiment—which is how I think it often comes off to people.
Amusingly, I actually only watched Terminator 2 for the first time a few months ago, and I was surprised to realize that Skynet didn’t seem so far off from actual concerns about misaligned AI. Before that basically my whole knowledge of Skynet came from reading AI safety people complaining about how it’s nothing like the “real” concerns. In retrospect I was kind of embarrassed by the fact that I myself had repeated many of those complaints, even though I didn’t really know what Skynet was really about!
I think I mostly lean towards general agreement with this take, but with several caveats as noted by others.
On the one hand, there are clearly important distinctions to be made between actual AI risk scenarios and Terminator scenarios. On the other hand, in my experience people pattern-matching to the Terminator usually doesn’t make anything seem less plausible to them, at least as far as I could tell. Most people don’t seem to have any trouble separating the time travel and humanoid robot parts from the core concern of misaligned AI, especially if you immediately point out the differences. In fact, in my experience, at least, the whole Terminator thing seems to just make AI risks feel more viscerally real and scary rather than being some sort of curious abstract thought experiment—which is how I think it often comes off to people.
Amusingly, I actually only watched Terminator 2 for the first time a few months ago, and I was surprised to realize that Skynet didn’t seem so far off from actual concerns about misaligned AI. Before that basically my whole knowledge of Skynet came from reading AI safety people complaining about how it’s nothing like the “real” concerns. In retrospect I was kind of embarrassed by the fact that I myself had repeated many of those complaints, even though I didn’t really know what Skynet was really about!