Jim Prosser, back in February:
Let me be clear about causation, because the AI parallel only
works if we’re honest about it. The communications failures didn’t
kill nuclear power. The disasters did. But two decades of talking
over the public meant the industry had built precisely zero
reservoir of human-scale trust to draw on when the real crises
hit. Nuclear pioneer Alvin Weinberg admitted in 1976 (three years
before Three Mile Island) that “the public perception and
acceptance of nuclear energy appears to be the question that we
missed rather badly.” After TMI and Chernobyl confirmed the
public’s worst suspicions, over a hundred planned U.S. reactors
were cancelled.
The entire essay is very good, quite thought provoking. But it really shines in drawing the parallels to nuclear power a generation ago, and the need to communicate the benefits to ordinary people in ways that they actually care about. Regarding OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman:
But think about what the people behind those numbers are actually
worried about. They’re not anxious about AI in the abstract, per
se, but its implications. They’re anxious about their job, their
kid’s homework, their creative work getting scraped without
permission, their privacy. Human-scale concerns that are specific,
personal, and grounded in the daily texture of individual lives.And Brockman’s response to this very specific, very human anxiety
is to … float further up into the philosophical stratosphere
while writing a mega-checks to a partisan PAC and explaining it in
the language of civilizational mission. It’s like a doctor hearing
a patient who says, “My knee hurts,” who then delivers a lecture
on the elegance of the musculoskeletal system. The patient doesn’t
need you to appreciate the beauty of human biology. They need you
to look at their damn knee.
