The notion of AI risk might also have seemed less compelling in a period before widely networked computers. Sometimes people say that you could just a pull a plug on a computer that misbehaved, which seems a little silly in an era where physical installations can be damaged by hacking and where it can be impossible to get a software uploaded to the Internet removed… but it probably felt a lot more plausible in an era where networking was mostly limited to military systems at first, and university networks later.
The notion of AI risk might also have seemed less compelling in a period before widely networked computers. Sometimes people say that you could just a pull a plug on a computer that misbehaved, which seems a little silly in an era where physical installations can be damaged by hacking and where it can be impossible to get a software uploaded to the Internet removed… but it probably felt a lot more plausible in an era where networking was mostly limited to military systems at first, and university networks later.