Directly advertising existential risk

"Future technology may be dangerous and needs to be studied more"

That's a reasonably safe statement, but I can still see it misconstrued as

• "Technology is bad." (sounds vaguely like a particular flavor of liberal flag waving, so some types of conservatives may react with pro-economic growth flag-waving)

• "The end is nigh!" (sounds like panic-inducing hysteria)

Even if the initial audience doesn't interpret it that way, that may be how they explain it to their friends. Preppers will bend it to fit and justify their narrative, and so will the all-natural types. That's just human nature.

I just re-watched Nick Bostrom's "End of Humanity" TED talk, and am again impressed with his skill at presenting these things in the abstract without triggering any knee-jerk reactions. However, once it enters the public awareness, I expect these sorts of interpretations:

• "20% chance of human extinction!" (Perhaps as a sensationalist headline somewhere.)

• The idea that more people is better is extremely counter-intuitive for many, especially given the planet's current overpopulation. Many people have overgeneralized this heuristic. It took me many months of consideration before I eventually came around to Bostrom's way of thinking, that future lives should be weighted equally to our own. Never being born just doesn't feel as bad as death, until you get into the philosophical details. I've talked to some that would argue that humans are so destructive to nature that the earth would be better without people, and so actively advocated against things like space colonization, even as a backup plan. Of course, this is more of belief in belief than actual belief, since they would never actually take steps toward human extinction.

• The idea of colonizing the universe is repulsive to some, who tend to argue that we shouldn't even consider spreading to other planets until we can fix all the problems we have here first. They get a mental image of humans exhausting all natural resources in reach, and destroying pristine planets. (Running out of asteroids is unlikely, due to the mind bogglingly large amount of material in the asteroid belt alone. If we could manage to deplete all that before the sun enters it's red giant phase, we'd be more than capable at that point of spreading to other stars to mine here and there instead of depleting any single region.)

• Similarly, the idea that technological maturity is a good thing is counter-intuitive for many people, and may evoke a knee-jerk reaction. The media tends not to cover all the good things we've accomplished as a species, so most people would not agree that we are on an upward trajectory rather than downward. They are certainly right that some technologies really are bad things, but they don't see the benefits of vaccines, modern medicine, sanitation, electricity, education, improved working conditions, leisure time, etc. compared to a century ago.

• This also fits neatly into the narrative of "liberal scare tactic", like many people perceive global warming to be.

• Many religious people will find this absurd, since a loving god who looked after us would never let us destroy ourselves like this.

If you can narrow the target audience of the ad sufficiently to show it mostly to academics, it's probably a net gain. However, just seeing it on an ad banner would be a very bad thing, because the default presumption is going to be that someone is making money off of you buying the argument. Are there ways to recommend it to academics on some social network or another, besides ads? Several social networks have "recommended" items, but I don't know much about the algorithms that do the recommending. I've looked into the 3 ad types on YouTube, though:

• YouTube "In-stream" ad videos at the beginning of videos are annoying, and are likely to have a net-negative outcome for advocacy groups, even if they are net-gains for selling products.

• "In-display" ads (appear on the right of YouTube, marked with yellow "AD") are much less intrusive, but still might make people wonder what our money-making scheme is. This one might be alright, especially if you can find a way to target academics, or at least intellectuals.

• "In-search" ads would be much easier to target toward academics with specific interests, but it would be quite a narrow focus. A less narrow focus might include conspiracy theorists and alarmists, which would be detrimental to our movement. I can only think of a couple good, academic-related search term which would be used by academics unfamiliar with X-risk. Maybe things like "Red List Index", "IUCN Red List of Threatened Species", "Holocene extinction", "Quaternary extinction", "Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction", "K–Pg extinction", "Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction", "Triassic–Jurassic extinction", "Tr–J extinction", "Permian–Triassic extinction", "P–Tr extinction", "Late Devonian extinction", "Ordovician–Silurian extinction", and "O–S extinction". I'd avoid less obscure phrases like "background extinction rate", "K-T extinction", etc.

Of the ad options on YouTube, I think "in-search" ads would be the most beneficial, if directed only with very specific technical search terms like the ones I suggested. I'm still somewhat concerned about how nature-lovers might misconstrue some of the concepts when first introduced to them. This is all just my attempt to follow the maxipok rule, as Bostrom suggests.

Although the YouTube comments on his "end of humanity" video are much better than the trolling YouTube is infamous for, they do still give you a feel for the range of reactions that people are likely to have. A few are generally agreeable, though. Just remember that the people who react to the title and never watch the video will have much worse reactions.