And yet, it’s a topic never discussed in the news. [...] The EA consensus is roughly that being blunt about AI risks in the broader public would cause social havoc.
I’m confused by this, haven’t people have been blunt about AI risks in public ever since Eliezer first woke up to the topic, and then Bostrom had his book (which got a lot of media attention) and so on? And I don’t think there’s any EA consensus about these things having been bad?
It seems to me that AI risk does get discussed in the news when something happens that’s in the kind of form that’s news-worthy; e.g. “Oxford philosopher writes a book warning about superintelligence destroying humanity, endorsed by Bill Gates and Elon Musk” was the kind of a thing that the broader public could easily understand and which is usually covered by news, and therefore it got a lot of publicity. I think that the problem is mostly that to be covered by the news, it has to actually look new; and since the fact that there are academics who worry about AI risk has already been covered, there would need to be something that the common person would experience as a significant update to that previous state of affairs.
I’m confused by this, haven’t people have been blunt about AI risks in public ever since Eliezer first woke up to the topic, and then Bostrom had his book (which got a lot of media attention) and so on? And I don’t think there’s any EA consensus about these things having been bad?
It seems to me that AI risk does get discussed in the news when something happens that’s in the kind of form that’s news-worthy; e.g. “Oxford philosopher writes a book warning about superintelligence destroying humanity, endorsed by Bill Gates and Elon Musk” was the kind of a thing that the broader public could easily understand and which is usually covered by news, and therefore it got a lot of publicity. I think that the problem is mostly that to be covered by the news, it has to actually look new; and since the fact that there are academics who worry about AI risk has already been covered, there would need to be something that the common person would experience as a significant update to that previous state of affairs.