Serious people talked very seriously about the possibility of transformative technological change and social change following from it (e.g. Keynes/Russell speculating that people would work way fewer hours in the future).
Don’t we have things like that today? E.g. Bengio and Hinton speculating that ASI will arrive and maybe kill everyone. Also, I’d argue that people like Bostrom and Yudkowsky will be viewed more favorably 50 years from now than they are today, and will generally be thought of as “serious people” to a much greater degree. When Keynes/Russell were speculating about the future, they probably weren’t as renowned as they are now.
Re: Politicians: Andrew Yang isn’t a major politician I guess, but his main schtick was “AI is coming” basically right?
Also Dominic Cummings has similar vibes, possibly even more extreme, than Churchill’s schtick about coal vs. oil.
Re: Politicians: Andrew Yang isn’t a major politician I guess, but his main schtick was “AI is coming” basically right?
Not really, from my memory and checking wikipedia, his campaign was mainly focused on advocating for UBI, and used whatever arguments it could to defend that policy position, including but certainly not limited to an argument that automation was coming, but mainly for menial tasks like truck driving.
Serious people talked very seriously about the possibility of transformative technological change and social change following from it (e.g. Keynes/Russell speculating that people would work way fewer hours in the future).
Don’t we have things like that today? E.g. Bengio and Hinton speculating that ASI will arrive and maybe kill everyone. Also, I’d argue that people like Bostrom and Yudkowsky will be viewed more favorably 50 years from now than they are today, and will generally be thought of as “serious people” to a much greater degree. When Keynes/Russell were speculating about the future, they probably weren’t as renowned as they are now.
Re: Politicians: Andrew Yang isn’t a major politician I guess, but his main schtick was “AI is coming” basically right?
Also Dominic Cummings has similar vibes, possibly even more extreme, than Churchill’s schtick about coal vs. oil.
Not really, from my memory and checking wikipedia, his campaign was mainly focused on advocating for UBI, and used whatever arguments it could to defend that policy position, including but certainly not limited to an argument that automation was coming, but mainly for menial tasks like truck driving.