I must have overlooked all those conferences on time travel that are on the same level as, e.g., AAAI.

But yes, public perception is a different thing. Most people are totally baffled when I tell them that the first spam email was sent in 1978, because for a lot of people the internet (and with it email) popped into existence somewhere around 2004.

Not to nitpick but this would rather be around 199x when AOL joined the Internet.

Oh, it's a different time for any group of people you ask. For some it was AOL, for others the media coverage that picked up around 1995/1996. And some were late to the game and only noticed when every one around them got DSL in the early 2000's. I kind of picked 2004 at random. It represents a (sadly rather sizeable) group of people in rural areas who neither got DSL nor internet over cable before that time and therefore just didn't pay attention.

But we had a presidential candidate run on fears of AI in 2020, so that poster has a real point.

> time travel

Really not the same. Time travel is hardly achievable and has a crisp goal. Artificial Intelligence, on the contrary, has been producing results since the start, and there are (there have been) entire businesses based on it.

> uncharitable

I was being «uncharitable» in front of the depiction of "masses discovering with surprise things that would have been noted by exploitation of the information available (and never had been as available as it is today)", also because on practical terms I find this unawareness of the world socially dangerous.

And it would be, no normal person (i.e. the public) thinks about time travel in any regular, meaningful way.