I think this claim needs stronger evidence than "we can be confident".
Hold on.
I accept all the rethorical apocalyptic stuff, it comes with the title and each of us can have an opinion.
But “move fast and break things” is Facebook motto, and when it come to sociability, society at large, and politics, I you cannot say that.
Facebook/Meta merely breaking B2B SaaS?
It’s not really about “Meta is bad”. It’s recognising the fact that social media, spearheaded by Facebook has changed society and politics.
Some like it some don’t. I don’t want to enter a culture war, but can we agree that with Meta the “object in question” is not just a SaaS? It is sociability, it is society, it is politics?
This guy is an associate professor of politics at Princeton University.
How can you advocate for future policies over AI while at the same time misleading on the tech revolution that has shaped the past, what, 20 years?
What is being taught in those classrooms?
Has Meta harmed society? Yes. Meta is bad.
Meta is both bad and incompetent.
The world we live in is not a meritocracy. It never has been.
You can be bad and incompetent and still be wildly successful.
See also: Donald J Trump
To make Croesus look like some bum under an I-80 overpass.
Some even say you have a moral obligation to do it in that case.
Kinda like nuclear bombs or similar.
That does seem like a path forward, pity about the wasted resources that could have gone toward more pressing matters like climate.
...and AI progress is actually a much more difficult thing to control than nuclear proliferation...
Unlike nuclear bombs there is no rare difficult-to-process ingredient which you can practically limit the supply of, unless you are willing to retroactively outlaw computing devices broadly (after we have spent decades weaving them into the fabric of most people's day to day lives).
And even if you were willing to try that, how do you get global consensus retroactively? It is an impossible situation.
None of what I've written here should be seen as a defense of the people running large AI labs, I don't believe any of them are forces for positive good in the world, but it is just a fact that if they don't "do it" someone else will.
There's no political angle worth discussing because none of them touch the ground. We have to look at what we have with sober eyes and ignore the grifters who insist "AGI is coming".
What we have is a copypasta fraud machine. There's no discussion to be had beyond that. It's illegal in most use cases, and a source of implementation uncertainty in all others. No new capabilities have been unlocked from this, nor will ever be. We just found a way to cut cost where the cost was already minimal.