As part of my job I host conversations specifically around this, I had a long dinner last night with a diverse group of congressional staffers, engineers, lawyers and managers at the wharf in Washington DC.
I also just got back from Africa and the Middle East talking with student students and educators as well as businessman across those regions.
What’s clear to me is that all of the consistent complaints about AI have nothing to do with AI as a technology. This isn’t new, it’s the history of technological revolution.
To a person, every complaint has to do with the intersection of commerce, government and social structure - and more specifically the management and identification of externalities.
So almost all of the argumentation and debaters are talking past each other
Extremely “pro” AI people talk about all of the real documented progresss but downplaying the risks and challenges and externalities. This is how every revolutionary technology (ICE, spinning jenny, steam engine, etc…) was sold and we live in that.
On the other side the people who are “anti-AI” almost exclusively talk about externalities and never talk about any benefits and any benefits that they do acknowledge are either “not AI” because they aren’t explicitly only LLMs or corrupted by the externalities themselves.
The challenge is both sides are correct in part but they can’t communicate with each other other.