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As an American I'm going to go out on a limb and say a big part of this is: Americans in particular are absolutely insulated from mass death. Why wouldn't we be? We've never fought major wars on our own soil in over a century. We haven't had major disease outbreaks killing mass people in like 100 years. We cannot comprehend it; the idea that mass amounts of people die (1,000,000 iraqis, 100,000s of people in warzones like Syria) in relatively short time spans is impossible for us to comprehend. This is the same reason why after 9/11, where a few thousand people died, people all over the country were literally having shared hysteria -- to the point of microwaving mail envelopes (Anthrax attacks!) or buying duct tape and plastic wrap to seal windows (Gas attacks!) They told kids in school about this shit and to prepare for it. It was hysteria, it was not isolated. I think most people willingly choose to believe it doesn't happen at all. A few bombings here and tactical strikes there, twice (or ten) times a day, in a war for 15 years. "Not that bad". Meanwhile we sit around and dream up AI scenarios where they're either A) Sci-Fi novel hellmachines who are bent on total domination of reality unless we "Fight the Machines" or B) useful, peaceful Roombas and car services that run us around and do all our chores and can never do any wrong. Look, my car can get my groceries for me! How fantastic is that! (provided your grocery store was not blown up by a Hellfire missile last week, of course) The third possibility, C, that hostile, unrefined AI will be used to continue to enforce colonial and imperial desires around the world, killing huge amounts of people? Not possible. It's not fanciful or fantastic enough to want to believe, so people don't. It's not a Steven King novel or an Elon Musk jerk-off fantasy. It's just boring old poor people dying. You only need to watch any discussion on Hacker News about "The threat of AI" to see how quickly people start talking about self-imposed God-machines, or talking about Ultra Roombas that do all your earthly chores -- while ignoring murder-robots in 3rd world countries, manned by massive armies. One of those is a fantasy dreamt up by 10 year olds, the other is a reality that already happens today with drone warfare. |