I agree with those who say that genocide is seen as deliberate, extinction as an act of God/Nature. I think extinction is also seen as too big to stop, whereas genocide might be stoppable by political or military means. And finally, genocide is seen as something that happens, extinction as something fictional or hypothetical.
Since we are talking about extinction being caused by human creation of out-of-control AIs… you need to recognize that this is a scenario way outside common sense. It’s like asking people to think about alien invasion or being in the Matrix. Genocide may be shocking but in the end it’s just murder multiplied by thousands or millions, and murder is something that all adults know to be real, even if only from the media.
So when you judge how people feel about genocide and about omnicide… it’s like asking how they feel about Hitler, versus asking how they feel about Thanos. Genocide is a thing that happened in the waking world of families and jobs, the world where normal adults spend most of their lives. Omnicide is something we only know about from movies and paleontology.
There is more to reality than the human life cycle, and the boundaries of what is normal do shift, or sometimes are just forcibly invaded by external factors. COVID was an external factor; AI is an external factor even if there are attempts to domesticate and normalize it. Modernity in general, going back more than a hundred years, has constantly been haunted by strange new things and strange new ideas.
It’s not impossible that AI doomerism will become a force sufficient to slow or stop the global race towards superintelligence (though if it’s going to happen, it had better happen soon). Stranger things have taken place. But for that to happen, people would have to regard it as a serious possibility, and they would have to not be seduced by dreams of AI Heaven over fears of AI Hell. So there are specific psychological barriers that would need to be overcome.
I agree with those who say that genocide is seen as deliberate, extinction as an act of God/Nature. I think extinction is also seen as too big to stop, whereas genocide might be stoppable by political or military means. And finally, genocide is seen as something that happens, extinction as something fictional or hypothetical.
Since we are talking about extinction being caused by human creation of out-of-control AIs… you need to recognize that this is a scenario way outside common sense. It’s like asking people to think about alien invasion or being in the Matrix. Genocide may be shocking but in the end it’s just murder multiplied by thousands or millions, and murder is something that all adults know to be real, even if only from the media.
So when you judge how people feel about genocide and about omnicide… it’s like asking how they feel about Hitler, versus asking how they feel about Thanos. Genocide is a thing that happened in the waking world of families and jobs, the world where normal adults spend most of their lives. Omnicide is something we only know about from movies and paleontology.
There is more to reality than the human life cycle, and the boundaries of what is normal do shift, or sometimes are just forcibly invaded by external factors. COVID was an external factor; AI is an external factor even if there are attempts to domesticate and normalize it. Modernity in general, going back more than a hundred years, has constantly been haunted by strange new things and strange new ideas.
It’s not impossible that AI doomerism will become a force sufficient to slow or stop the global race towards superintelligence (though if it’s going to happen, it had better happen soon). Stranger things have taken place. But for that to happen, people would have to regard it as a serious possibility, and they would have to not be seduced by dreams of AI Heaven over fears of AI Hell. So there are specific psychological barriers that would need to be overcome.