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I've seen people talk mention The Terminator a bunch with respect to inspiring AI Doomers, but I just don't see it. Obviously the plot of the films helped to popularize the idea of AI killing us all, but the line of thinking that AI Doomers display seems to have no connection to those films, which posited an AI that quickly decided that getting rid of humans was in its best interests and decided to use a nuclear war to help to accomplish this, followed by robots and cyborgs like the "terminators" to hunt down the survivors. This is very different from what I hear coming from Doomers, which involves an AI or multiple AIs that have no antipathy for humans or particular desire to hunt them down and also posits that the mechanism of robots hunting us down would be silly compared to easier methods they have at their disposal (and also that if robots did hunt us down with AI, then they would do it pretty easily, since their reaction times, accuracy, and precision, to say nothing of mental focus and stamina, greatly outstrip our own, by orders of magnitude).
now compare that to anime, that at that time was much less mainstream (I would posit unknown to the general western population above 30) and in the west lacked stories that could be interpreted as the basis for the Doomer cult centered on AI. As for your observations of The Terminator, I will just posit that, that is the number 1 franchise the mayority of people think of when Killer AI is mentioned, and Skynet when adversarial AI's enter the conversation, followed in close second by AIM and HALL 9000.
Right, a majority of people think of Arnold or HAL, but Doomers are not a majority of people and are, IMHO, very different from regular people. Regular people don't really think about this stuff and just connect the superficial similarities between Terminator and AI Doom in the future, whereas AI Doomers seem to have arrived at their position by looking at actual current science, not science fiction, and extrapolating into the future in a way they find plausible. I think inspiration by fiction, whether that be The Terminator or anime, is a tiny factor when it comes to AI Doomers.
Also, I'm assuming AIM doesn't stand for AOL Instant Messenger, but I don't know what it refers to.
what do you think is more probable, that the Doomers saw Terminator in theaters when they were children or that they watched Anime related to AI doom?.
that is a major disagreement we have there. To me Doomers and "rationalists" in general are just regular people very good at rationalizing their biases.
Sorry, it was supposed to be AM not AIM. From I have no mouth and I must scream.
I mean, neither is particularly probable, since the popular/good Terminator films are rated R, and I don't really know of anime related to AI doom in a similar way. I don't think Doomers tended to get their inspiration from fiction they watched as children, though, since the narrative of the Doomers tend to be very different from the AI doom narratives seen in fiction.
I don't see where the disagreement is. I believe that Doomers and rationalists in general (two different though overlapping sets of people) are just regular people very good at rationalizing their biases too. That doesn't mean that they're not very different from regular people, because "being very good at rationalizing one's biases" isn't the one and only characteristic that defines humans. Regular people don't tend to look into technology and try to project it decades into the future to predict where things will go, which is how Doomers seem to have come to their conclusions. Regular people tend not to have much interest in AI or robots or technology at all, where as Doomers almost by definition do.
Personally, I think Doomers, again, largely got inspiration from looking at technology and projecting it to the future in a way that is... rather hubristic or conceited. I'd call them a modern iteration of an apocalypse cult, much like idpol/SJW/CRT/wokeness/etc. is a modern iteration of a religion. It fulfills all the roles of such things while transforming just enough things to be convincing to modern educated people who consider themselves scientific and rational, since the old versions of these had too many characteristics that were too obviously incompatible with science; so they just made them less obvious. But I don't think either were inspired by The Terminator or other such works of scifi.
we are in agreement on that point then.
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