Rob Wiblin

Actually, is there anything technical we can do here or is this primarily a policy and politics question?

You spent a lot of time talking to governments over the last couple of years, people in governments.

But it seems like, by and large, they are not troubled primarily by the stuff that you and I are concerned about, but certainly not about loss of control as a key focus.

Have you gotten any leads on what are the best things to raise, the best experiments to talk about that actually get people to think of that as a top-tier concern rather than a secondary or tertiary concern?

Yeah, I think there is an experiment that was done a couple of years ago, I think, where they presented a random sample, I think, of Americans with many different essays basically explaining the control problem and with many different angles and focuses.

And they all worked reasonably well if the person read the substantial block of text.

And they all worked about equally well, which is interesting, the many different angles.

It was kind of just, I think, an exposure effect of actually sitting down and thinking about it for some period of time.

But I guess it's hard to get people to spend a lot of time thinking about this, especially if you're asking for the whole population to do it.

But I suppose the window between people paying a lot of attention and when big decisions have to be made might be quite narrow, unfortunately.

Yeah, I've been worried about this issue for 15 years or so, and I guess have been working on it more intensely over the last couple of years.

But I often find myself just feeling quite drained and exasperated and a bit exhausted.

I think the main reason being just so often encountering, I feel like, people who are creating the problem who feel like they want to be willfully blind to the issue.

I mean, I guess being more charitable, it's hard to understand.

We're all speculating about how things might go.

But in my heart, I often just feel like people are deluding themselves almost quite consciously and just saying absolutely crazy stuff about how they think it's going to be safe and things are going to go fine.

And that's just emotionally, frankly, quite draining.

It's almost difficult to maintain motivation when you're fighting against people who are actively creating a problem where they could kind of stop or take actions and have a lot more effect than you, I suppose.

if they were willing to be more honest with themselves or be more thoughtful, pause and really, really reflect on what's going to happen.

Did you also have this experience?