I guess the main difference between now and then is that we are starting to have an idea of what is going to be possible and already see “dark uses” of technology happening (e.g., surveillance in china) whereas beforehand we were clueless about those things.
I think that rejecting proactive legislation per se is a dangerous attitude. For example, see climate change. Proactive legislation could have made us avoid all of the discussions we are now working through during crunch time...
If we have reasonable evidence that there is a high likelihood of us creating worlds that we don’t want to live in, we should take reasonable action proactively to avoid those scenarios.
Thus, I agree with you that not all unprecedented technologies need to be proactively legislated but as soon as there is reasonable evidence for possible negative consequences we should start reasonable processes to avoid those consequences. There is no black or white situation here, we need to have evidence based discussions and work our way through this collectively.
