Remember the debate about how nuclear was stopped in the 70s because of NIMBYism? We are now wondering "how could people then be so stupid and shortsighted?". Well, there you go, here's history repeating before our eyes.
AI is completely different. The risks are not well understood, but are plausibly catastrophic along multiple dimensions. The potential upside is also not well understood.
I remember the optimism of the early internet, when it seemed like it was going to be this incredibly free and liberating realm for everyone to learn and express themselves freely. But now nearly all of that has been reduced or destroyed by the greed of powerful people. The exact same people who are set to control super powerful AI.
Do you really think someone like Elon, who gleefully destroys lives for fun, is going to willingly cede immense amounts of power just to improve the lives of a bunch of normies he'll never meet?! That completely flies in the face of how he and his contemporaries have acted their entire lives, so count me as a little skeptical.
If the deployment of nuclear energy required the distribution of radioactive material to every smartphone in America and for unstable isotopes to be plugged into the core operating infrastructure of every industry, then they'd be a lot closer to analogous.
Today we are much more enlightened and smart, and our convoluted arguments, that sound very smart and somehow reach the same conclusion that the technology must be stopped, are totally right. We're not opposed to AI due to irrational fear and NIMBYism, like those simpletons before.
You are so rational!
But we really aren't. We're still driven by irrational sentiments and fears. We hate AI because it's new and feels icky, and will bring change and we don't like change. We would prefer the 2020s to be frozen in time forever and ever (although we're more than happy to benefit from progress that happened before our time, which upended the lives of other people long dead).
So that's it, there's no argument. The only argument is "I hate AI because fuck it", which is much more sincere. I don't need to hear about water or electricity or cognitive decline or any other made up stuff that sounds intellectual.
It's incredibly lazy to group technologies by "were people afraid of this? Yes/No"
You can actually look a bit more closely at the specific technologies being discussed and what we know (now) and knew (then) about them.
Obviously nuclear energy and AI have at least as many differences as they have similarities.
If I'm opposed to drone-based atmospheric deployment of aerosolized anthrax, does that make this technology basically the same as nuclear energy, and therefore my concerns are stupid? Or are there relevant features of the technologies themselves that perhaps matter more than features of people's responses to those technologies?
> I don't need to hear about water or electricity or cognitive decline or any other made up stuff that sounds intellectual.
Again, you're making arguments up in your own head. I didn't talk about any of these things. But now that you mention cognitive decline...
Check this out: https://x.com/PessimistsArc
There is an infinitely long list of technologies that "Luddites and doomers" tried to block and were thankfully successful in doing so.
CFCs and ozone.
Leaded gasoline.
Thalidomide.
Offensive bioweapons.
I'm not claiming Luddites and doomers are always or usually right (they're often wrong), but your claim they were wrong every time is just total epistemological failure on your part.
How much clown makeup do you guys put in your coffee?