AI Has Evolved Into Something Quotidian, But Not Disruptive

IBL News | New York

The AI threat has evolved into something more quotidian, similar to other social megatraumas, such as nuclear proliferation, climate change, and pandemic risk. The dystopian prediction of super intelligence takeoff, as well as human extinction and other bad outcomes, didn’t take place, according to experts consulted by The New York Times.

Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, two Princeton-affiliated computer scientists, published in April “A.I. as Normal Technology.” They stated, “We should understand AI as a tool that we can and should remain in control of, and we argue that this goal does not require drastic policy interventions or technical breakthroughs.”

Elon Musk recently declared that for most people, the best use for his LLM Grok was to turn old photos into microvideos.

However, the hype cycle dominates the economy:

• Around 60 percent of stock-market growth in recent years has been attributed to AI-associated companies.

• Researchers are negotiating pay packages in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

• Overall, AI capital expenditures show that there is more money being poured into construction related to chip production than into offices. The economist Alex Tabarrok said, “We’re building houses for AI faster than we’re building houses for humans or places for humans to work.”

Self-driving cars, like Waymo cabs, and Ukrainian autonomous drones will be followed by drug development, materials discovery, and other innovations, and the economy will be transformed. Like electricity, the Industrial Revolution, or the internet, AI will utterly change, but not terminate, the world.