It’s a good point. For epistemic hygiene I think it’s critical to actually have models of the growth rate and what is implied. Eg we are seeing exponential growth on many capability metrics (some with doubling-times of 7 months), but haven’t joined this up to economic growth numbers. In models where the growth continues you could imagine stuff getting crazy quickly, eg one year AI contributes 0.5% GDP only measurable in retrospect, next year 2%, year after 8%.
Personally I don’t think politicians are capable of adapting fast enough to this extreme scenario. So they need to start thinking about it (and building and debating legislation) long before it’s truly needed.
Of course if it turns out that we are living in one of the possible worlds where true economically meaningful capabilities are growing more slowly, or bottlenecks just happen to appear at this critical phase in the growth curve, then this line of preparation isn’t needed, but I’m more concerned about downside tail risk than the real but bounded costs of delaying progress by a couple years. (Though of course, we must ensure we don’t do to AI what we did to nuclear).
Finally I’ll note in agreement with your point, that there are a whole class of solutions that are mostly incomprehensible or inconceivable to most people at this time (ie currently fully outside the Overton Window). Eg radical abundance -> UBI might just solve the potential inequities of the tech, and therefore make premature job protection legislation vastly harmful on net. I mostly say “just full send it” when it comes to these mundane harms, it’s the existential ones (including non-death “loss of control” scenarios) that I feel warrant some careful thought. For that reason while I see where you are coming from, I somewhat disagree on your conclusion; I think we can meaningfully start acting on this as a society now.