This sort of statements are too broad and impossible to falsify. Freedom in what context? Political? Societal? Also can you have freedom or not have freedom? Is freedom a binary state?
Freedom in many countries is a scale, you are free to do this or that but not too much of it and not to everyone.
Furthermore, even in countries that are deemed to have greater freedom than others, they are still countless things that are banned so again freedom is really in the eye of the beholder.
> the escalating calls for an international treaty to ban superintelligence
There is 0 chance of that happening since we can't even define what intelligence is never mind superintelligence. A model can be great at coding software while hopelessly incapable at solving trivial things like when there was the whole "strawberry" spelling debacle not long ago.
> In other words, the present AI resistance speaks almost entirely of preventing risks still to come.
And that is exactly why this sort of effort is not going to succeed. If you are looking to ban or regulate things that don't pose a threat then what are we even doing here?
We have always started by allowing things and then restricting them when harm had been proven. Not the other way around.
Changing how things work and preemptively banning or regulating things in advance because of the harm that could result without clear evidence is opening the Pandora's box where a bunch of bureaucrats decide what citizens should or should not do based on vibes. Hardly a model to follow.
> Given what we have already seen of AI, we can be confident that its widespread adoption will create a less free society, a less virtuous people, and a degraded culture.
And this is supported by evidence I imagine? "we can be confident" is nothing but vibes. No sources, no peer-reviewed studies, just opinions. Is this supposed to be a good argument in favor of regulating AI because if it is then it's preposterous.
If you think AI is bad and will create chaos, fine, prove it then. And even if you could prove it, it certainly would not be a binary thing. AI is a tool that can be used in many ways. Some bad, some good.
> So far, opponents of AI have overwhelmingly focused on predicting its economic effects.
And we are supposed once again to trust these people because of what? Their track records? Experienced economists have trouble predicting what the global economy will look like 5 years from now but we are supposed to simply accept that the conclusion of the people who are for regulating and/or banning AI are infallible. That makes 0 sense.
At the moment the effect of AI is a known unknown. We do not know what it will do to the economy 5 years from now. Maybe it will destroy entire parts of the global economy, maybe it will create more opportunities in many industries. If we do not know then the best course of action and is to wait and see what happens before jumping the gun.
> It is—already—a moral and cosmological cataclysm
And the superlatives keep on coming...
I stopped reading after that. This article is not serious. We can criticize AI without using terms such as the ones above.
The author also never presents who "the people who oppose AI " are and what they really want. Are they governments? NGOs? Groups or citizens? We don't know.
I don't like the people who preach that AI is going to solve all our problems but the author is going in the complete opposite direction and using the same vibes to support their argument and that really does not help his case.