How do you know that "artilects" are not getting noticed?

* A number of projects have shown proof of concept, yet hard AI still seems
to be gasping for real funding.

* Artilect online communities are under populated (are there any others?)
and rather inactive.

* As Ben Houston (thanks for the book refs) points out, the scientific
community are wary of crying wolf. At the same time, the public has been
over-primed and immunised by Sci-Fi hype, to extent that ideas that are
closely associated with Sci-Fi are, as a matter of course, put aside as 'pie
in the sky' or 'more than a few generations away'.

* De Garis makes a plea to applied philosophers to examine the subject of
species dominance and gets only rebuffed (however politely:
http://foobar.starlab.net/~degaris/news/singer.html).

* Respected (?by TV editors) futurologists routinely describe futures which
seem to take no account of artilect presence.

In so many areas of scientific advance we see technology arriving before
suitable debate on the issues of ethics that they raise. Artilects, it
seems to me, are the biggest case in point and the main obstacle to debate
seems to be that the public simply don't think it'll impact within their
lifetimes.

The less the public are informed of the issues, the bigger the shock will be
when it hits them in the face, and the bigger the shock the bigger the
potential Terran backlash. General awareness has got to be raised. Not
cosmist proselytizing, but presenting a believable case to Joe Public
showing that artilects will impact human ethics within one generation.

regards
Tony

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