Do you know what the counter-arguments were like? I couldn’t even find any.
Not really, though I expect there must have been some objections. I think digging in the 1950s-60s era and the way they talked about nuclear risk would probably be very instructive. The talk “The AI Dilemma” (look it up on YouTube if you haven’t seen it already) even brings up specifically the airing of the TV movie “The Day After”, and how it concluded with a panel discussion between experts on nuclear risk, including among others Henry Kissinger and Carl Sagan. The huge amount of rightful holy terror of nuclear war back in that day most likely worked, and led to enough people being scared enough of it that in the end we avoided it. Worryingly, it’s now, far from the peak of that scare, that we start seeing “but maybe nuclear war wouldn’t be that destructive” takes (many appeared around the beginning of the war in Ukraine).
Yeah that definitely seems very analogous to the current AI x-risk discourse! I especially like the part where he says the UN won’t work:
Do you know what the counter-arguments were like? I couldn’t even find any.
I would agree that the UN is a sham. I don’t see why you count Russell as being wrong on this point.
Not really, though I expect there must have been some objections. I think digging in the 1950s-60s era and the way they talked about nuclear risk would probably be very instructive. The talk “The AI Dilemma” (look it up on YouTube if you haven’t seen it already) even brings up specifically the airing of the TV movie “The Day After”, and how it concluded with a panel discussion between experts on nuclear risk, including among others Henry Kissinger and Carl Sagan. The huge amount of rightful holy terror of nuclear war back in that day most likely worked, and led to enough people being scared enough of it that in the end we avoided it. Worryingly, it’s now, far from the peak of that scare, that we start seeing “but maybe nuclear war wouldn’t be that destructive” takes (many appeared around the beginning of the war in Ukraine).