This is a special post for quick takes by davekasten. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
I feel like one of the trivially most obvious signs that AI safety comms hasn't gone actually mainstream yet is that we don't say, "yeah, superintelligent AI is very risky. No, I don't mean Terminator. I'm thinking more Person of Interest, you know, that show with the guy from the Sound of Freedom and the other guy who was on Lost and Evil?"
In this context, it's actually kind of funny that (at least the latter half of) Person of Interest is explicitly about a misaligned superintelligent AI, which is misaligned because its creator did not take all the necessary safety precautions in building it (as opposed to one of the main characters, who did). Well, technically it's mostly intent-aligned; it's just not value-aligned. But still... And although it's mostly just misuse risks, there still is a strong component of just how difficult it is to defend the ... (read more)