Do you actually have a comprehensive list of technologies X predictions, that shows that people are generally biased towards pessimism? Because plenty of people have falsely predicted that new technology X would make things better. And also falsely predicted that new technology X wouldn’t amount to much and/or would leave things about the same level of goodness. And also different sub-groups of people probably have different biases, so we should look at sub-groups that are more similar to the current AI safety crowd (e.g. very smart, technically competent, generally techno-optimistic people with lots of familiarity with the technology in question). Also different sub-groups of technology probably have different tendencies as well… in fact, yeah, obviously your judgment about whether technology X is going to have good or bad effects should be based primarily on facts about X, rather than on facts about the psychology of the people talking about X! Why are we even assigning enough epistemic weight to this particular kind of trend to bother investigating it in the first place?
Do you actually have a comprehensive list of technologies X predictions, that shows that people are generally biased towards pessimism? Because plenty of people have falsely predicted that new technology X would make things better. And also falsely predicted that new technology X wouldn’t amount to much and/or would leave things about the same level of goodness. And also different sub-groups of people probably have different biases, so we should look at sub-groups that are more similar to the current AI safety crowd (e.g. very smart, technically competent, generally techno-optimistic people with lots of familiarity with the technology in question). Also different sub-groups of technology probably have different tendencies as well… in fact, yeah, obviously your judgment about whether technology X is going to have good or bad effects should be based primarily on facts about X, rather than on facts about the psychology of the people talking about X! Why are we even assigning enough epistemic weight to this particular kind of trend to bother investigating it in the first place?