Because there’s a high likelihood that that’s not at all how this technology is going to be spread amongst the population, or all countries and this technology is going to be way more than Einstein in a pocket. How do you even structure society around that? What about all the malicious people in the world. Now they have Einsteins. Great, nothing can go wrong there.

> How can this be bad?

Guys, how can abestos be bad, it's just a stringy rock ehe

Bros, leaded paint ? bad ? really ? what, do you think kids will eat the flakes because they're sweet ? aha so funny

Come on freon can't be that bad, we just put a little bit in the system, it's like nothing happened

What do you mean we shouldn't spray whole beaches and school classes with DDT ? It just kills insects obviously it's safe for human organs

We thought the same 25 years ago, when the whole internet-thing started for the broader audience. And now, here we are, with spam, hackers, scammers on every corner, social media driving people into depressions and suicides and breaking society slowly but hard.

In the first hype-phase, everything is always rosy and shiny, the harsh reality comes later.

For example, imagine AI outpacing humans when it comes to most economically viable activities. The faster it happens, the less able we are able to handle the disruption.

We don't even know what kind of society we could have if the value of 99.9% of peoples labor (mental or physical) dropped to basically zero. Our human existence has so far been predicated and built on this core concept. This is the ultimate goal of AI, and yeah as a stepping stone it acts to augment our value, but the end goal does not look so pretty.

Reminds me of a quote from Alpha Centauri (minus the religious connotation):

"Beware, you who seek first and final principles, for you are trampling the garden of an angry God and he awaits you just beyond the last theorem."

We’re all going to be made irrelevant and it will be harder to adapt if the things change too quickly. It may not even be us that needs to adapt but society itself. Really curious where you get the idea this is just a vocal minority of office workers concerned about the future. Seems like a lot of the ones not concerned about this are a bunch of super confident software engineer types which isn’t a large sample of the population.