The x-risk issues that have been successfully integrated into public awareness, like the threat of nuclear war, had extensive and prolonged PR campaigns, support from a huge number of well-known scientists and philosophers, and had the benefit of the fact that there was plenty of recorded evidence of nuclear explosions and the destruction of Hiroshima/Nagasaki. There are few things that can hit harder emotionally than seeing innocent civilians and children suffering due to radiation poisoning. That, and the Cold War was a continuous aspect of many people’s lives for decades.
With AI, it seems like it would have to be pretty advanced before it would be powerful enough to affect enough people’s lives in equivalently dramatic ways. I don’t think we’re quite there yet. However, the good news is that many of the top scientists in the field are now taking AI risk more seriously, which seems to have coincided with fairly dramatic improvements in AI performance. My guess is that this will continue as more breakthroughs are made (and I am fairly confident that we’re still in the “low hanging fruit” stage of AI research). A couple more “AlphaGo”-level breakthroughs might be enough to permanently change the mainstream thought on the issue. Surprisingly, there still seems to be a lot of people who say “AI will never be able to do X”, or “AGI is still hundreds or thousands of years off”, and I can’t say for sure what exactly would convince these people otherwise, but I’m sure there’s some task out there that would really surprise them if they saw an AI do it.
The x-risk issues that have been successfully integrated into public awareness, like the threat of nuclear war, had extensive and prolonged PR campaigns, support from a huge number of well-known scientists and philosophers, and had the benefit of the fact that there was plenty of recorded evidence of nuclear explosions and the destruction of Hiroshima/Nagasaki. There are few things that can hit harder emotionally than seeing innocent civilians and children suffering due to radiation poisoning. That, and the Cold War was a continuous aspect of many people’s lives for decades.
With AI, it seems like it would have to be pretty advanced before it would be powerful enough to affect enough people’s lives in equivalently dramatic ways. I don’t think we’re quite there yet. However, the good news is that many of the top scientists in the field are now taking AI risk more seriously, which seems to have coincided with fairly dramatic improvements in AI performance. My guess is that this will continue as more breakthroughs are made (and I am fairly confident that we’re still in the “low hanging fruit” stage of AI research). A couple more “AlphaGo”-level breakthroughs might be enough to permanently change the mainstream thought on the issue. Surprisingly, there still seems to be a lot of people who say “AI will never be able to do X”, or “AGI is still hundreds or thousands of years off”, and I can’t say for sure what exactly would convince these people otherwise, but I’m sure there’s some task out there that would really surprise them if they saw an AI do it.