I do think there is a lot of truth to that. Reminds me of the people who said in the 1990′s “Well, as soon as the arctic ice cap start to melt, then the climate deniers will admit that climate change is real”, but of course that haven’t happened either.
I do wonder, though, if that’s equally true for all of those fields. For example, in terms of anti-aging technology, it seems to me that the whole status quo is driven by a very deep and fundamental sense that aging is basically unchangeable, and that that’s the only thing that makes it acceptable to people, and I would suspect that anything that starts to change or threaten that perception even a little bit could cause radical alterations to how people act.
AI, though, is a field where it’s especially hard for a lay people to get an idea of either how fast things are advancing or how much farther they have to go before a human-level GAI becomes possible; everyone is used to a constant stream of “cool new things” coming out of the tech fields, but it’s much harder to get an idea of what the larger picture is. I also think that technology news generally isn’t covered very well in the media, which makes it even harder. Fundamentally, I think that most people do understand that computers are a transformative technology, it’s just that they think that the computer revolution has already mostly happened.
I do think there is a lot of truth to that. Reminds me of the people who said in the 1990′s “Well, as soon as the arctic ice cap start to melt, then the climate deniers will admit that climate change is real”, but of course that haven’t happened either.
I do wonder, though, if that’s equally true for all of those fields. For example, in terms of anti-aging technology, it seems to me that the whole status quo is driven by a very deep and fundamental sense that aging is basically unchangeable, and that that’s the only thing that makes it acceptable to people, and I would suspect that anything that starts to change or threaten that perception even a little bit could cause radical alterations to how people act.
AI, though, is a field where it’s especially hard for a lay people to get an idea of either how fast things are advancing or how much farther they have to go before a human-level GAI becomes possible; everyone is used to a constant stream of “cool new things” coming out of the tech fields, but it’s much harder to get an idea of what the larger picture is. I also think that technology news generally isn’t covered very well in the media, which makes it even harder. Fundamentally, I think that most people do understand that computers are a transformative technology, it’s just that they think that the computer revolution has already mostly happened.