I thought this conversation was excellent, interesting, and well-facilitated. But wow did I find this exchange frustrating. The dynamic at play here is that for-profit companies are racing to make a nearly-impossible-to-control technology that is smarter than we are at almost everything. If they get what they want, the best case scenario is it replaces humans at things and they get rich. The worst is that it kills people (and, likely, they get rich). And maybe you don't think the "kill people" thing will happen. Cool. We should still have a democratic discussion about whether or not we want that before we get there, and if we do want it, what we want to use it for. And we should give us ourselves time to have that conversation. It is also true that at the same time, AI is doing bad stuff right now. We should stop those bad things! And on top of those bad things, they are setting up an economic situation that leads to, through one door, job loss, and through the other, a massive market correction. We need to prepare for that reality. But somehow a corner of the left has twisted itself into pretzels to say that “actually, regulating superintelligence plays into the hands of incumbents." But...the solution to incumbent-favoring regulation is to write better regulation, not to concede the question of what these systems become to the people building them. Not regulating them plays into their hands! The whole thing is that their money (and concentration of power into their hands) comes when the technology is exponentially more powerful than it is right now. This is just a different technology than we've dealt with before, and we need to act accordingly. Can’t we just...do all of this? What are we doing here? xitter.cf/emilybazelon/status/21…