I expect that any people whose concepts get hopelessly distorted by this movie would be a lost cause anyway. Reasoning correctly about AI risk already requires the ability to accept a number of concepts that initially seem counterintuitive: if you can’t manage “this doesn’t work the way it does in movies”, you probably wouldn’t have managed “an AI doesn’t work the way all of my experience about minds says a mind should work” either.
Granted. Still, the general public is never going to have an accurate understanding of any complex concept, be that concept evolution, climate change, or the Singularity. The understanding of non-specialists in any domain is always going to be more or less distorted. The best we can hope for is that the popularizations that make the biggest splash are even semi-accurate so that the popular understanding won’t be too badly distorted: and considering everything that Hollywood could have done with this movie, this looks pretty promising.
I expect that any people whose concepts get hopelessly distorted by this movie would be a lost cause anyway. Reasoning correctly about AI risk already requires the ability to accept a number of concepts that initially seem counterintuitive: if you can’t manage “this doesn’t work the way it does in movies”, you probably wouldn’t have managed “an AI doesn’t work the way all of my experience about minds says a mind should work” either.
“hopelessly” probably not. But that doesn’t mean that the distortion is insignificant.
Granted. Still, the general public is never going to have an accurate understanding of any complex concept, be that concept evolution, climate change, or the Singularity. The understanding of non-specialists in any domain is always going to be more or less distorted. The best we can hope for is that the popularizations that make the biggest splash are even semi-accurate so that the popular understanding won’t be too badly distorted: and considering everything that Hollywood could have done with this movie, this looks pretty promising.