Andart

Distinguishing silly disasters from non-silly disasters

Terminator studies and the silliness heuristic | Practical Ethics - I blog about the media coverage of the Cambridge Project for Existential Risk and how it all got focused on stupid Terminator imagery, and why the silliness heuristic is so bad for judging existential risk issues.

The basic problem is that detecting whether something is worth considering further requires us to have intuitions about the topic. We have no experience whatsoever with the future, existential disasters, or future technology so we should expect our intuitions to be lousy. So any "oh, that's silly"-responses about these topics should be regarded as totally suspect.