&gt; <i>Consider: &quot;Previous books published by authors hailing from Country X contained flaws in their logic; therefore since this book&#x27;s author came from Country X, this book must also have a logical flaw.&quot; It&#x27;s not a very strong form of argument: you might as well just read the book to see if it has logical flaws. Similarly even if a claim seems superficially similar to the kind of claim made by non-credulous people, that&#x27;s far from conclusive evidence for it being an invalid claim.</i><p>You&#x27;re right, that&#x27;s not a very strong form of argument. But that is not my argument. The connection between Bostrom and previous doomsayers is not as arbitrary as geography. Your analogy is false. The connection between Bostrom and other doomsayers in the structure of their thought. The way they falsely extrapolate great harm from small technological shifts.<p>&gt; <i>It would be a shame if religious doomsayers have poisoned the well sufficiently that people never listen to anyone who is saying we should be cautious of some future event.</i><p>I think many people do not realize the quasi-religious nature of AI speculation. Every religion and charismatic mass movement promises a &quot;new man.&quot; In the context of AI, that is the singularity, the fusion of humans with intelligent machines. The power we associated with AI present and future leads us to make such dramatic, quasi-religious predictions. They are almost certainly false.<p>&gt;<i>Sure, but there have been a few like nuclear weapons that were very much not a waste of time. Again, you really have to take things on a case by case basis.</i><p>Nuclear weapons are fundamentally different from every other doomsday scenario I cited because they were designed explicitly and solely as weapons whose purpose was to wreak massive destruction at a huge cost to human life. The potential to destroy humanity <i>defined</i> nuclear weapons. That is not the case for other technological, demographic and resource-related doomsday scenarios, which are much more tenuous.