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I think this is a misunderstanding of the problem. Any idea that remains only in the rarified air of academia will never be taken seriously by anyone not working on a phd. Very few leaders in modern neoliberal states read about topics that don’t have some general interest. And the general public cannot get excited about ideas that are not being circulated either in the news or in popular fiction.
Most people don’t make a habit of reading scientific or technical journals, and even if someone outside of the field tried to read articles on a topic, it’s not a simple thing to understand. People need an idea interpreted for them, and quite often made entertaining for them. People are talking about AI because they’re seeing it in the news and in movies and on TV. They understand AI going bad because of terminator movies, or AI going right because they grew up watching Data try to understand humanity. They understand space through countless movies and TV shows or at best science popularizers. Obviously none of this is nearly as good as going directly to academia, but news and media are at the way most people get their ideas.
True, but academia has credibility. At least compared to a nobody whose only claim to fame is having sent mail bombs to normal people who were just doing their jobs. Not exactly a great way to get people to take you seriously.
It has credibility, but because of the insular nature of their communication, which is basically designed by academia for academia, it’s largely opaque to nonacademics and nonspecialists. In short the vast majority of people couldn’t read an academic text and very very few bother to try. If you want *the public to even talk about the issue, it’s critical that the content reach the public in some sort of digestible form.
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