@allgarbled - Somebody please convince me otherwise, but lately I find

Somebody please convince me otherwise, but lately I find the techno-optimism seems hollow. The pace of AI progress is increasing, as far as I can tell. Apparently, AGI is imminent. And can somebody tell me exactly what concrete progress is being made towards ensuring that it will “benefit all humanity?” I think people are mostly looking out for their own fortunes. To be honest: the normie view, which I take to be something like, “a small group of people in San Francisco aim to become fantastically wealthy and aren’t really concerned if they put everyone else out of work in the process” seems more and more convincing to me. And on the whole existential doom thing, I don’t really believe that AI has much risk of ending humanity as we know it, but the people building it do. So maybe I should take them at their word? I think AI is pretty incredible. I’m optimistic about its abilities to do increasingly amazing things. But when you have guys who look like comic book villains talking about how they want to buy galaxies...it’s a bit discouraging from a broader social perspective, don’t you think? I’d love to see some of the secret treasure trove of brilliant Dario essays that Anthropic is apparently sitting on. Maybe that would make me feel more optimistic. Anyways, it’s hard to really blame anyone. If one guy doesn’t do it, the other guy will. So why not? In a gold rush, you’re supposed to mine for gold. That’s the point. Okay, that’s enough rambling for now. I would really like to be convinced otherwise. I’m open minded. Maybe it is actually the most ethical gold rush ever in history and we’ll end up in a space opera utopia where all diseases have been cured and we can live in edenic peace forever. You tell me.