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The ultra sci-fi utopian scenario and the mass extinction nanobots scenario are both a) exciting and b) relieve humanity of responsibility. If the god AI comes then it comes, nothing you can do about it. So naturally people gravitate towards scenarios like that.
More realistic AI concerns about things like job loss and surveillance are more mundane, and, crucially, they are things that we as a society might actually have some degree of control over, if we make the right choices. So that sounds boring and hard. So people would rather not think about it.
I think the issue here is that you are imagining current and historic types of oppression, but worse. With AI technology, 1984-style thought control becomes obsolete. Imagine a world where all human-level tasks can be automated. That old military adage about needing boots on the ground to hold and secure territory? Poof. Gone. The killbots can search your house for contraband and identify friend from foe. The Hobbesian constraints on political power disappear. Whoever controls the killbots controls the world.
But wait, isn’t this exactly, “current and historic types of oppression, but worse”? No. There isn’t any demand for labor anymore. That means there isn’t any reason for the common man to even exist. No political power + no economic value = you are a waste of calories. Sure, a human in charge is more likely to have sentimental attachment to other humans than a fully-agentic shoggoth AI would, but I still don’t like our chances.
So I guess that makes me on optimist, because I believe we were land merely in a 1984 dystopia.
None of this is going to happen in the foreseeable future, and is not guaranteed even in the most feverish "recursive improvement" scenario. Comparative advantage ist still a thing. Rationalists have a long history of pooh-pooing, brushing it off, and coming up with convoluted arguments for why it no longer applies, but it's still a thing. This is why they spent the 2010's preaching doom at blue-collar workers (I knew a guy who was literally reaching out to truck drivers and giving them vocational guidance, because self driving trucks are gonna replace them any day now) only for it to turn out that it's the brainy white-collar ones that will be the first on the chopping block. Kill bots? Yeah, very impressive, but why should I waste my precious GPUs doing stupid grunt work, when I can get a bunch of the more unscrupulous humans to do the same thing, and pay them in guaranteed rations of actual meat, instead of the usual Uncle Klaus' Bugz?
On the other hand 1984 surveillance is absolutely going to happen. The whole idea of AI is almost tailor made for it, and we are currently slapping digitization on top of every aspect of our lives, even when it brings no practical value, just to make sure we can feed more data to the AI, and nothing escapes it's gaze. Once the technology takes off they'll have insights into what makes us tick that will make Big Brother blush.
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And at that point I just want to ask the Basilisk what can I do to help.
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