Fair. If you don’t share my intuition that people in 1950 should have had more than 90% credence that computers would be militarily useful, or that people at the dawn of steam engines should have predicted that automobiles would be useful (conditional on them being buildable) then that part of my argument has no force on you.
Maybe instead of picking examples from the past, I should pick an example of a future technology that everyone agrees is 90%+ likely to be super useful if developed, even though Joe’s skeptical arguments can still be made.
Fair. If you don’t share my intuition that people in 1950 should have had more than 90% credence that computers would be militarily useful, or that people at the dawn of steam engines should have predicted that automobiles would be useful (conditional on them being buildable) then that part of my argument has no force on you.
Maybe instead of picking examples from the past, I should pick an example of a future technology that everyone agrees is 90%+ likely to be super useful if developed, even though Joe’s skeptical arguments can still be made.