Great points, and yeah you're right, that the mainstream conversation regarding AI is locked in a kind of fetal paralysis because the concept is too fantastic and dominated by sci-fi portrayal (which is often sensationalized to highly detrimental extents, no?). Ultron, Her, Matrix - various portrayals (of varying calibers) which send messages that are almost always oveshadowed by the more impressive production elements.
But underneath that frozen layer, that unactivated conversation, festers this age-old insecurity about being somehow essentially distinct from the physics around us, denying the possibility that we could eventually build something, physically, through increasingly masterful manipulations of whatever is around us, that surpasses us at some atomic or subatomic level.
Because even a cursory mainstream understanding of AI (basically that it is an intricate pattern recognition gauntlet, which could be expressed in such a way as to adhere to the Common Sense, to be accessible and even intuitive) could enable markets to open up, for various industries/fields, even recreational, and we could hasten the road to some AI golden age (perhaps an age where myriad material problems are solved, but are supplanted by higher-order existential and metaphysical problems?).
But such an understanding is bogged down, and yeah I suppose almost the only people attempting any public education are more or less coming from Silicon Valley, no? Is that your point, and that however dubious they may seem to us, we can rest assured that there are far more dubious technicians and investors out there?
Part of what makes it scary, perhaps, is how heavily associated it with surveillance (quick thought about phenomenology
@suspendedreason , perhaps data collection can be appreciated subjectively as a kind of surveilled paranoia, like there are forces objectively above you that can cultivate you how they pleas. Phenomenology of paranoia?).
surveillance (n.)1802, from French surveillance "oversight, supervision, a watch," noun of action from surveiller "oversee, watch" (17c.), from sur- "over" (see sur- (1)) + veiller "to watch," from Latin vigilare, from vigil "watchful" (from PIE root *weg- "to be strong, be lively"). Seemingly a word that came to English from the Terror in France ("surveillance committees" were formed in every French municipality in March 1793 by order of the Convention to monitor the actions and movements of suspect persons, outsiders, and dissidents).
The example that would likely come up first is China, no? I know very little about China, and I wish I knew more, because it would be crucial to understand how AI is implemented there, even from an outside perspective. Is anyone here more familiar with how machine learning/AI has been integrated into China?