In my (seemingly) short lifetime, I have been told by "experts" we'd - very soon - run out of oil, wouldn't be capable of feeding the human population, run out of room for human remains burial, run out of landfill space, turn Earth's atmosphere into a Martian hellscape, run out of space on the internet, have no more bees, run out of drinking water, glaciers and polar ice caps would disappear, never see snow again...the list of unfulfilled doom goes on and on.
And now AI is "credibly" treated as a potentially existential threat to all of humanity. Someday my great grandkids will (hopefully) be able to look back at the 1970s - 2020s and wonder just what in the hell we were thinking. After discovering and enjoying 200 years of the benefits of free market capitalism and libertarianism, we reflexively resorted to authoritarianism and collectivism each time we found ourselves confronted with the latest imagined threat. And we elected people who went along with it.
Liberty is not a natural condition. It's a *better* condition for the advancement of living standards and for countless other things, but humans need to override their wiring to some degree to embrace it properly.
It's why "do something" sells much better than "do nothing," even when the "something" has proven to be wrong time and again.
In my (seemingly) short lifetime, I have been told by "experts" we'd - very soon - run out of oil, wouldn't be capable of feeding the human population, run out of room for human remains burial, run out of landfill space, turn Earth's atmosphere into a Martian hellscape, run out of space on the internet, have no more bees, run out of drinking water, glaciers and polar ice caps would disappear, never see snow again...the list of unfulfilled doom goes on and on.
And now AI is "credibly" treated as a potentially existential threat to all of humanity. Someday my great grandkids will (hopefully) be able to look back at the 1970s - 2020s and wonder just what in the hell we were thinking. After discovering and enjoying 200 years of the benefits of free market capitalism and libertarianism, we reflexively resorted to authoritarianism and collectivism each time we found ourselves confronted with the latest imagined threat. And we elected people who went along with it.
Liberty is not a natural condition. It's a *better* condition for the advancement of living standards and for countless other things, but humans need to override their wiring to some degree to embrace it properly.
It's why "do something" sells much better than "do nothing," even when the "something" has proven to be wrong time and again.