Preventing a one-off disastrous experiment like Chernobyl isn’t analogous to the coming problem of ensuring the safety of a whole field whose progress is going to continue to be seen as crucial for economic, humanitarian, military, etc. reasons. It’s not even like there’s a global AI control room where one could imagine panicky measures making a difference. The only way to make things work out in the long term is to create a consensus about safety in the field. If experts feel like safety advocates are riling up mobs against them, it will just harden their view of the situation as nothing more than a conflict between calm, reasonable scientists and e.g. over-excitable doomsday enthusiasts unbalanced by fictional narratives.
I highlight later on that Beirut is a much more pertinent situation. No control room there either, just failures of coordination and initiative.
Also, experts are not omnipotent. At this point, I don’t think there are arguments that will convince the ones who are deniers, which is not all of them. It is now a matter of reigning that, and other, field(s) in.
Preventing a one-off disastrous experiment like Chernobyl isn’t analogous to the coming problem of ensuring the safety of a whole field whose progress is going to continue to be seen as crucial for economic, humanitarian, military, etc. reasons. It’s not even like there’s a global AI control room where one could imagine panicky measures making a difference. The only way to make things work out in the long term is to create a consensus about safety in the field. If experts feel like safety advocates are riling up mobs against them, it will just harden their view of the situation as nothing more than a conflict between calm, reasonable scientists and e.g. over-excitable doomsday enthusiasts unbalanced by fictional narratives.
I highlight later on that Beirut is a much more pertinent situation. No control room there either, just failures of coordination and initiative.
Also, experts are not omnipotent. At this point, I don’t think there are arguments that will convince the ones who are deniers, which is not all of them. It is now a matter of reigning that, and other, field(s) in.