What you've mapped here is a system for spreading intellectual pollution.
Not just individual minds, but societies, have a limited "bandwidth" of attention. Spending more money, infiltrating more channels, and ensuring that information comes from multiple points rather than just one source ensures a message occupies more of that bandwidth. Real risks, actual genuine existential threats, are crowded out of our society's attention by a fantasy.
I am reading this piece after a sleepless night after finishing Annie Jacobsen's terrifying book "Nuclear War: A Scenario". For a subject I know a lot about - I've been something of a nuclear war strategy nerd since my early teens - Jacobsen managed to shock me. She details an imminently plausible scenario for how a single missile launch by North Korea (out of madness, spite, accident, the reason doesn't matter) spirals out of control into a global thermonuclear war between the major powers because of the structure of the US nuclear command and control system. And this is a threat that actually exists, today, right now at this very instant. And it is one that could be disarmed by a few policy changes: ones the US could do unilaterally, with minimal or zero loss of deterrence. And the policy changes are the kinds that political pressure and influence campaigns could bring about. I can only imagine what this much money, focused into that effort, could do towards greater strategic stability.
But enough people, and people with wealth and influence, prefer to focus on the risk of death via superintelligent AI. And it's not actually hard to see why: puzzles are more fun than problems. An open ended puzzle, one without a clear, achievable end state (how would you ever know you have succeeded in curbing AGI 'Risk'?), can be played forever - I studied philosophy in grad school: I would know. And the people involved are highly intelligent, and into the same things you are, so there is social proof: I can't be a deluded fool wasted my time and distracting society from real problems, I'm one of an elite vanguard.
But actually addressing a real problem requires playing by the world's rules, not ones you fantasized about in online forums and now get nonprofit money to continue to fantasize about. It requires addressing a hard problem, with entrenched interests and 75 years of institutional inertia behind it, and a nightmarish danger that is, despite what people say, not only not "unthinkable" but eminently imaginable.
What you've mapped here is a system for spreading intellectual pollution.
Not just individual minds, but societies, have a limited "bandwidth" of attention. Spending more money, infiltrating more channels, and ensuring that information comes from multiple points rather than just one source ensures a message occupies more of that bandwidth. Real risks, actual genuine existential threats, are crowded out of our society's attention by a fantasy.
I am reading this piece after a sleepless night after finishing Annie Jacobsen's terrifying book "Nuclear War: A Scenario". For a subject I know a lot about - I've been something of a nuclear war strategy nerd since my early teens - Jacobsen managed to shock me. She details an imminently plausible scenario for how a single missile launch by North Korea (out of madness, spite, accident, the reason doesn't matter) spirals out of control into a global thermonuclear war between the major powers because of the structure of the US nuclear command and control system. And this is a threat that actually exists, today, right now at this very instant. And it is one that could be disarmed by a few policy changes: ones the US could do unilaterally, with minimal or zero loss of deterrence. And the policy changes are the kinds that political pressure and influence campaigns could bring about. I can only imagine what this much money, focused into that effort, could do towards greater strategic stability.
But enough people, and people with wealth and influence, prefer to focus on the risk of death via superintelligent AI. And it's not actually hard to see why: puzzles are more fun than problems. An open ended puzzle, one without a clear, achievable end state (how would you ever know you have succeeded in curbing AGI 'Risk'?), can be played forever - I studied philosophy in grad school: I would know. And the people involved are highly intelligent, and into the same things you are, so there is social proof: I can't be a deluded fool wasted my time and distracting society from real problems, I'm one of an elite vanguard.
But actually addressing a real problem requires playing by the world's rules, not ones you fantasized about in online forums and now get nonprofit money to continue to fantasize about. It requires addressing a hard problem, with entrenched interests and 75 years of institutional inertia behind it, and a nightmarish danger that is, despite what people say, not only not "unthinkable" but eminently imaginable.
Thank you for your work in exposing all of this.
"A system for spreading intellectual pollution" - that's spot on.
I appreciate your thoughtful response.