Thanks for your reply! I like your compressed version. That feels to me like it would land on a fair number of people. I like to think about trying to explain these concepts to my parents. My dad is a healthcare professional, very competent with machines, can do math, can fix a computer. If I told him superintelligent AI would make nanomachine weapons, he would glaze over. But I think he could imagine having our missile systems taken over by a “next-generation virus.”
My mom has no technical background or interests, so she represents my harder test. If I read her that paragraph she’d have no emotional reaction or lasting memory of the content. I worry that many of the people who are the most important to convince fall into this category.
Wanted to say that I enjoyed this and found it much more enlightening than I expected to, given that I have no intrinsic interest in dentistry. I would value a large cross-discipline sample of this question set and think it would have been very useful to my younger self. I think the advice millennials were given when considering college degrees and careers was generally unhelpful magical thinking. These practical questions are helpful. I’d be interested in slightly longer form answers. Are these edited, or was this interviewee laconic?