>People did not go around spreading fear about controlling electricity because you could die if you touch a raw electric wire passing current.
Please sir, forgive me for saying the following statement before hand...
What in the holy fuck are you talking about? Have we forgot the debate around Edison and Topsy the elephant?
I only say this with such an extreme tone because everyone around from then is dead and you're engaging in a rewrite of history yourself by selectively forgetting/ignoring all documented debates from that time.
I am not that familiar with the whole story, though I know it is in popular culture in US. From what I remember, it was about a bad behaving elephant who was euthanized publicly first by cyanide with electrocution as a backup. This was rumored to be a demonstration of AC current, but not as familiar with it. The story seemed cruel when I first read it, but did not pursue it in detail.
I am probably wrong about electricity, in my mind I was referring to decade of 1910s and 1920s. There were debates no doubt, but were they as polarizing as the ones we have today? Newer things are scary, but what we have today is downright fearmongering.
>but were they as polarizing as the ones we have today? Newer things are scary, but what we have today is downright fearmongering.
I implore to take a break from current events and do some studying of journalism history. 'Yellow Journalism' is a term from 1890. There is nothing particularly new here. Even scientific debates of the day were filled with tons of complete garbage. What you're suffering from here is survivorship bias. The bullshit and otherwise wrong statements mostly get forgotten about over time, and the statements where people were correct get restated, copied, and otherwise taught again so it seems like the past was far more wise than it actually was.
In addition, if electrical demon snakes had rose out of the wires and strangled all of us in our sleep, we wouldn't be here to write about it now. Much the same if we decided to launch nukes during the cold war. And the same will be true if we make an evil ASI. The probability of electricity killing mankind (in mass) is near zero. The probability of nukes killing mankind is likely far closer to 1 than anyone would like to admit. With ASI, I have no clue, but from my understanding of the problem space, we're a lot farther from 0 then I am comfortable with.
Please sir, forgive me for saying the following statement before hand...
What in the holy fuck are you talking about? Have we forgot the debate around Edison and Topsy the elephant?
I only say this with such an extreme tone because everyone around from then is dead and you're engaging in a rewrite of history yourself by selectively forgetting/ignoring all documented debates from that time.