zlacker

One of the--admittedly many--things that puts me off AI is the pitch starts off as "you will have abilities you never had before and probably never would have had, be excited", then when critics are like, "woof it's a little worrying you can <generate a million deepfakes>, <send a million personalized phishing emails>, <scrape a million websites and synthesize new ones>, etc.", the pitch switches to "you could always have done this, calm down".

The whole point of software engineering is to do stuff faster than you could before. It is THE feature. We could already add, we could already FMA, we could already do matrix math, etc. etc. Doing it billions of times faster than we could before at far less energy expenditure--even including what it takes to build and deliver computers--has led to an explosion of productivity, discovery, and prosperity. Scale is the point. It changes everything and we know it; we shouldn't pretend otherwise.