The “this is no different than before!” argument is dismissible on its face. As evidenced by NVDA’s trillion dollar valuation and the hundreds of billions being deployed into AI companies — that’s not because they’re building stuff that makes the world just the same as it was before.

Ah yes, middle school/high school bullies: famously disempowered by things like plausible deniability. The suffering caused by bullying and harassment: powerless in the light of plausible deniability.

AFAICT the people who would be close to this issue (e.g. people who pay attention to online harassment, teen mental health, and child pornography) come to a different prediction as far as impact. I’m far more inclined to believe them than people leveling an argument that, as I said, can just as readily defend murder, car thefts, and medical malpractice. All the suffering is just in people’s heads and all of it can be eliminated by proliferating the behavior to sufficient degree.