> You're talking about extinction, not social media or phone addiction.

Not saying you’re wrong but if I wanted to cultivate a mass hysteria as cover for a regulatory capture power play, this is exactly what I’d want everyone to believe.

I don’t think people care about if things pause or not, just why the government has to be involved.

I work in non AI robotics and if we had a system that in the course of doing what we told it to did something we didn’t want it to do (what AI companies called being misaligned) we would call it a bug and fix it with the fix being prioritized based on how bad the thing we didn’t want the robot to do is.

Sometimes preventing the robot from doing dumb stuff also means the robot can’t do smart stuff that it would be able to do if we left some code in. We balance the two factors out based on our understanding of what our customers want.

Obviously LLMs are more complex than what I do, but it doesn’t feel like it’s by THAT much.

So why does the government need to be involved again?

The vast majority of the public agree that climate change is real and that human activity is at least a contributing factor. They’ve agreed on that for quite a few years now, and yet there’s little indication that we’re going to pause or slow down our consumption of fossil fuels.

I strikes me as unlikely that public opinion will succeed with AI where it’s failed with other existential crises.

I would argue the opposite in terms of inevitability. I see this like Prisoner's dilemma - even though there is technically a better outcome by cooperating, knowing that, it is in the individual firm's self-interest to not cooperate and thus we end up at the equilibrium where nobody does. Especially with IPOs around the corner, I feel there's too much pressure (and money) not to go with this strategy.