Jay Bean

Imagine if all the people creating the web browser and the early internet were constantly warning you that the internet would destroy the world instead of doing what it actually did, which is make the world more connected than ever before, while giving you access to all the world's knowledge. We probably would have a bastardized version of the net, not the open, democratizing net that let anyone communicate with anyone else directly over massive distances. Of course, every technology has its downside and the internet has some and AI will have some too. But I don't understand this obsession with people who work in AI and want to tell you all the bad things that it will do. The mainstream media just eats this stuff up because that's what they do, conflict and horror. So they happily keep asking the same questions like when will AI kill us all or destroy all the jobs? And these folks just keep answering: Tonight's story is Dooooooooooooooom! When will we wake up from this collective delusion and realize that this is subconscious status seeking by folks who want to inflate their importance in the world and that there is no basis for what they are saying? How long will it take before we realize that what Altman said recently is the most likely scenario, that AGI will arrive and it will change the world but not as much as we expect, just like every technology before it. We find balance with technology. We adapt. That's what we do. These constant doomsday predictions are the one dimensional, black and white thinking of children. It doesn't take into account any other engineering developments along the way, or that we learn as we build technologies and that those learnings change the technology, or that there will be mitigations we put in place along the way that we take from those learnings, like we always do. Planes got safer and safer the longer we developed them and the more we understood their flaws. So did refrigerators and the production of milk and medicines and everything else in the history of technology. We learn. We adapt. If there is a problem with the net, it comes from its greatest strength in that it's given a voice to all these folks who have a problem for every solution and who can't change the subject and who won't shut up about it. They are leading us to a world where one or the more important technologies if the future is crushed and controlled by a tiny group of people who can censor anything and bend the AI to their worldview and filter out everyone else's instead of you interacting directly with people. Once people default to asking AI for everything, instead of looking it up themselves, AI becomes our interface to the digital world. We don't want that interface controlled by a few companies who can warp it and force it down a narrow channel with a limited world view, rather than showing you the vast and wonderful diversity of life. That's what you should really fear, not AI turning you into a paperclip. You should fear people who think open is dangerous, when open is the foundation for all greatness.