I've given responses before where I go into detail about how I disagree with some public presentation on AI; the primary example is this one from January 2017, which Yvain also responded to. Generally this is done after messaging the draft to the person in question, to give them a chance to clarify or correct misunderstandings (and to be cooperative instead of blindsiding them).
I generally think it's counterproductive to 'partially engage' or to be dismissive; for example, one consequence of XiXiDu's interviews with AI experts was that some of them (that received mostly dismissive remarks in the LW comments) came away with the impression that people interested in AI risk were jerks who aren't really worth engaging with. For example, I might think someone is confused if they think climate change is more important than AI safety, but I don't think that it's useful to just tell them that they're confused or off-handedly remark that "of course AI safety is more important," since the underlying considerations (like the difference between catastrophic risks and existential risks) are actually non-obvious.
Does it make sense to give a public response? Who would be able to do it?
The conference organizer, who had asked me to evaluate the talk, offered to interview me to set things straight. However, I don't know if that is sensible, and given my level of experience, I'm afraid I would misrepresent AI risk myself.
To be concrete: the talk was Should We Fear Intelligent Machines? by Gerald Sussman of SICP fame. He touched on important research questions and presented some interesting ideas. But much of what he said was misleading and not well-reasoned.
In response to the comments I add specifics. This is the same as I sent to the conference organizer, who had asked me for an evaluation. Note that this evaluation is separate from the interview mentioned above. The evaluation was private, the interview would be public.
Because of the low sound quality, I might have misunderstood some statements.
Mr. Sussman touched on important research questions.
His solution approaches might be useful.
He touched on some of the concerns about (strong) AI, especially the shorter term ones.
He acknowledged AI as a threat, which is good. But he wrongly dismissed some concerns about strong AI.
Many of his arguments made big jumps.
It was hard to understand, but I think he made fun of Max Tegmark and Eliezer Yudkowsky who are very active in the field. At least Tegmark would laugh with anyone joking about him. [(This is my expectation given his public appearances. I don't know him personally.)] But those remarks do give the audience a wrong impression and are therefore not helpful.
Having such a talk at an engineering conference might be good, because it raises awareness, and there was a call to action. There is also the downside of things being misrepresented and misunderstood.