I’m not sure this matters for the lived experience of the humans living through those other times, given the worse information environments they/we faced. Unless you happened to actually be an expert in the relevant fields (and sometimes even then) the types of warnings and fearmongering going on, however wrong compared to the actual risks we now face from AI, were just as dire. There are still large communities of otherwise seemingly intelligent people utterly convinced that climate change and resource depletion are imminent apocalyptic threats that will cause collapse of civilization and/or human extinction by mid-century. In other words: “A reasonable assessment of the evidence at the time” is a much higher bar than most people ever attain about almost anything anywhere near this complex and novel.
I agree with this 100%.
I’m not sure this matters for the lived experience of the humans living through those other times, given the worse information environments they/we faced. Unless you happened to actually be an expert in the relevant fields (and sometimes even then) the types of warnings and fearmongering going on, however wrong compared to the actual risks we now face from AI, were just as dire. There are still large communities of otherwise seemingly intelligent people utterly convinced that climate change and resource depletion are imminent apocalyptic threats that will cause collapse of civilization and/or human extinction by mid-century. In other words: “A reasonable assessment of the evidence at the time” is a much higher bar than most people ever attain about almost anything anywhere near this complex and novel.