News stories in post: 16 Number with a picture from the movie series Terminator: 8 / 16 Number referencing Terminator in text (some with text had no picture, and vice versa): 11 / 16
Popular but not as popular: HAL references.
News stories with no Terminator picture and no textual references to HAL or Arnold Schwarzenegger: 1 / 16, the New Scientist.
To be fair the Guardian story only references Terminator in the header. The text body is written by Lord Martin Rees and is a short but clear description of X-risk without any sci-fi references. It also focuses more on other X-risks, perhaps a difference in opinion amongst the founders?
(“Lord Martin Rees is a British cosmologist and astrophysicist. He has been Astronomer Royal since 1995 and Master of Trinity College, Cambridge since 2004. He was President of the Royal Society between 2005 and 2010”. For anyone like me who didn’t know.)
Interesting; there is now a member of a national legislature who is publicly concerned about existential risk. I wonder if he’s planning to try to use his political power to reduce x-risk. My guess: probably not. He appears to be rather a lot more interested in science than in politics, and I’m not sure to what extend the average member of the House of Lords even has political power.
Tallinn and Price are very concerned with AI-related Xrisk. Martin Rees currently considers biological risks his no.1 concern (which is not to say he’s unconcerned by AI); he’s famously offered bets on a major (~1 million death) bio-related catastrophe occuring in the coming years.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124121965740478983.html
News stories in post: 16
Number with a picture from the movie series Terminator: 8 / 16
Number referencing Terminator in text (some with text had no picture, and vice versa): 11 / 16
Popular but not as popular: HAL references.
News stories with no Terminator picture and no textual references to HAL or Arnold Schwarzenegger: 1 / 16, the New Scientist.
To be fair the Guardian story only references Terminator in the header. The text body is written by Lord Martin Rees and is a short but clear description of X-risk without any sci-fi references. It also focuses more on other X-risks, perhaps a difference in opinion amongst the founders?
(“Lord Martin Rees is a British cosmologist and astrophysicist. He has been Astronomer Royal since 1995 and Master of Trinity College, Cambridge since 2004. He was President of the Royal Society between 2005 and 2010”. For anyone like me who didn’t know.)
Interesting; there is now a member of a national legislature who is publicly concerned about existential risk. I wonder if he’s planning to try to use his political power to reduce x-risk. My guess: probably not. He appears to be rather a lot more interested in science than in politics, and I’m not sure to what extend the average member of the House of Lords even has political power.
By the way he wrote excelent book on x-risks.
http://books.google.ru/books/about/The_End_of_the_World.html?id=CLvuO9_lDmwC&redir_esc=y
download: http://www.avturchin.narod.ru/Rees.doc
Tallinn and Price are very concerned with AI-related Xrisk. Martin Rees currently considers biological risks his no.1 concern (which is not to say he’s unconcerned by AI); he’s famously offered bets on a major (~1 million death) bio-related catastrophe occuring in the coming years. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124121965740478983.html
NPR’s Morning Edition had about 30s on this topic today. They also included a voice clip from the Terminator: “Hasta la vista, baby.”