Whether you were around or not is irrelevant, I wasn't around for some of that either. I brought it up so we can learn from the past instead of repeat those mistakes.
> , there was no prior tech that was anything like it to even make realistic guesses into what it would turn out to.
Same with LLMs.
> AI is not a net good.
You're falling into the same trap as previous generations when you do that. You won't actually end up fixing or improving the negative impacts of AI and your country/society will lose out big time in all sorts of ways.
Tech doesn't make things bad, people do to the most part. Where AI is abused, it needs legislation, not resistance and you should know it is a LOT more nuanced than that. How is an LLM language translator for tourists being loped in the same bucket as LLMs being used to target people for assasination? Your lack of nuance is laziness, no political or ideological stand can justify that laziness.
Nuclear energy had a lot of negatives, and people made the same types of arguments and outright banned it, next time you complain about climate change consider that your way of thinking might be part of the problem. Right now datacenter build outs are contributing to water scarcity for example, so instead of doing the hard and nuanced work of actually regulating and fixing that you oppose AI entirely. You do the easy thing, in the end we live in the real world and supply/demand economics rules, so your resistance is only performative at best, or catastrophic to the economy at worst. The latter part isn't for billionaries, and it isn't just for job markets, when the economy goes, all the climate change talk goes with it, all the EVs, green energy initiatives,etc... go, wars and crises increase, disease outbreaks increase. Doing the easy thing leads to this is my point, not that you need AI to prevent those.
> I find it absurd that experienced engineers today look at AI and believe it will make their children’s lives better, when very recent history, history they themselves lived through, tells a very different story.
100x it would! although whose children depends on who regulates it first. My bet is China and the EU will regulate the crap out of it and extract the most value for themselves and future generations. AI is just solution, a tool, it isn't magic as you very well know. Companies have being using ML for surveillance for a long time. The US gov was using life of pattern analysis ML ten years ago to pick out assassination targets in Afghanistan and Pakistan. You have a fundamental lack of laws and a broken system of governance, don't take that out on tech.