Congresswoman, allow me, as a thirty year writer and technologist: Please stop listening to the loudest extremists in the room. The young man you quoted is part of an extremist group who believes in the end of the world and they are involved in sophisticated propaganda campaign designed to make people afraid of AI. He said, with a straight face, that "we have no idea how to control" AI when it is *already* deployed to billions of people *right now.* It has one of the most remarkable safety track records in world technology history. It makes lawn mowers look like a menace to society by comparison. If anyone else came to you positive they could predict the end of the world based on developments in technology that *do not exist today in the real world* you would throw them out of the room as crackpots and yet we are taking these folks seriously when they talk about an imaginary threat that "could" or "may" exist in the future while providing zero actual evidence in the real world. AI drives cars that have a 95% safer track record than human beings, who kill 1.2 million people on the road every year and injury 50 million more. It is designing personalized cancer vaccines medicine for companies like Moderna that are making inroads to stopping aggressive forms of cancer resistant to all other drugs. It is currently driving an unprecedented boom in software development, the very job that was supposed to be effected by AI the most. Again and again, these extremist voices about AI have been wrong. At what point do you stop and question their judgement and stop taking their words at face value? It was supposed to create a jobs apocalypse and it created a jobs boom for both blue and white collar workers and continues to do so. Again, when do we stop and say, they are probably wrong about everything and we need to stop listening to them? Geoffrey Hinton, the so called Godfather of AI, once said "we should stop training radiologists" because AI will just be too good at it. That was a decade ago and he had to admit recently that 1) he didn't understand that when something we cheaper we just got more scans and 2) he did not understand the work. And yet still, he is supposedly right about this? It is not that there are not problems and never will be. But they are problems we already have laws to deal with and they are engineering problems, not magical super intelligent being problems that have no solution. For example, the hacking incident this lady refers to was in no way a "rogue AI" and does not in any way indicate consciousness despite the "independent research" using that kind of inflammatory language. It was humans who set the AI in motion and told them to hack. You should hold those humans accountable with the laws we already have that make hacking illegal. The "independent researcher" on the Hugging Face report is not independent and has no cybersecurity incidence response experience and is a part of this extremist movement that believes they can predict the end of the world with a straight face. These are the same folks who said GPT-2 was too dangerous. This is just rhetorical nonsense. It is not real. It is designed to ratchet up regulatory burden on small businesses and centralize power with a few large labs who can shoulder that burden. This is not good for Americans and for regular people who will come to rely on these systems more and more in the future. We have already seen what happens when we allow tech companies to centralize power and stop competition. Don't let it happen again. Do not be fooled by these extremists. The do not represent mainstream thinking in AI. They are just the loudest and most fanatical people in the room who will not shut up. They are fanatical in the Winston Churchill definition of "a fanatic is someone who can't change their mind and won't change the subject. They do not represent sound, sane understanding of the actual risks of AI. There are realistic risk and the end of the world has absolutely zero to do with them. Ask yourself, how many cancer vaccines will we fail to create if we suppress this technology and listen to these extremists? How many people will die on the road? How many people will happen if China leads on this technology, because they absolutely are not and will not slow down, no matter what these fools tell you? How much dirty air are we breathing and how many people die of lung disease because we listened to extremists who told us nuclear energy was dangerous to the environment? How many deaths will be on our hands because we didn't move forward with developing this profoundly beneficial technology? How many young people will die of cancer or on the road? When you ask yourself what are risks of going forward, I ask you to look closely at what we will lose if we do not because it is infinitely worse than a young man's childish and ridiculous fantasy of the end of the world.

Not only I am tired of these wild AI speculations of impeding doom from self important people: I resent them. I actively resent people proposing to crash the economy or proposing authoritarian control over my life and other people's lives with idiotic and dangerous ideas like chip control or bans or tracking researchers. Every idiot in history who's taken the approach of "the ends justify the means" to solve an imaginary future disaster created the very disaster they wanted to stop. See Population Bomb leading to the one child policy and Communism leading to Mao's mass famines and Fascism leading to the death of tens of millions of people and war. These solutions are evil and worse than any disease that they propose to solve. It you believe you can actually predict the end of the world then you are as insane as the Heaven's Gate cult that killed themselves in the 90s thinking UFOs were coming to transcend them. Not only should we not take your policies and fear mongering seriously, we should actively throw out any and all of your proposed solutions because they come from a place of delusion. I don't give a shit that you work in the industry or think you saw something or that you want to virtue signal on X. You are actively contributing to a horrible future based on baseless speculation that has no grounding in reality. Don't confuse expertise in a domain with ability to predict impact of that domain or frankly to make predictions a decade out better than a dart throwing monkey. They are orthagonal skills. How's Hinton's "we don't need to train Radiologists anymore" working out? How did the Population Bomb work out? The global cooling second ice age? Peak oil? Just because someone is a bridge engineer does not mean they can predict the impact of bridges on society or that they have any actually useful insight at all on the complex, ever changing system called life. There are people dying in wars right now. Children starving. Homelessness. Dictatorships. In short, real problems. And we're supposed to drop everything to stop a made up problem in your head? Pound sand. We don't care. And we are not going to remake society based on you scary monsters under the bed delusion.