We had two such anti-technology jobs moral panics in the last 20 years — “outsourcing” enabled by the Internet in the 2000’s, and “robots” in the 2010’s. The result was the best national and global economy in human history in pre-COVID 2019, with the most jobs at the highest wages ever.
most people refused to believe that the internet would change anything at all. there was no panic. when bill gates went on letterman and was asked to explain how the internet was different than what already existed, he couldnt. letterman taunted him, saying "ever heard of a tape recorder? ever heard of a radio?" and he was oddly not wrong. thats the extent of the panic in the case of the internet.
AI is certainly different. it is extremely different from all other technologies because it is the only technology that replaces the human mind completely rather than just augment it. the argument of these reverse-luddites is that technology has always been good therefore it always will be good. there is no deeper analysis of whats really going on. there cant be, because it will always lead to the conclusion that our way of life as humans cannot co-exist with AGI.
one must understand that human society is held in place by an economic and technological equilibrium. if AGI were to be created, it cannot be denied that science and technology would almost instantly surge forward by trillions of man-years. we would be transported instantly into an environment where fundamental economic and technological factors are no longer valid. rules would be so different that the very concept of a country would no longer be geopoliticaly tenable. new meta-organisms would be at the center of the new equilibrium and the old human-based meta-organisms that we call countries would cease to exist. in essence, once the singularity happens the most severe and profound power vacuum that has ever existed will be created and the world will transition into a new version of itself where grotesque machine-based meta-organisms find a new equilibrium. this will involve what we call "war" and the idea that the human race could survive this is immediately dismissed. on the other side of the war will be a world where human industry is not just redundant but cosmically irrelevant. if by some miracle we survived the singularity, if our existence posed the slightest inconvenience to the machines, we would all die. this is not true currently because the dominant meta-organism is always human-based. thats the difference.
the absolute best case scenario is that humans somehow manage to parasitically attach themselves to an AGI meta-organism. they would lead lives devoid of agency or purpose except to ogle the machines. except that wouldnt be very interesting because the machines will immediately embark on doing things that a human being could never, ever understand.
people have this delusion that natural selection wont apply to AGI or the singularity. the singularity wont be about you or your fantasy. it wont be about humans or human society.