Right, but things rarely happen ‘for the good of humanity’, they just happen, and like mass production or the newspaper or even writing and language itself, it appears, we make use of it, we stumble and eventually we figure out where it really fits into the world. It will always be taken advantage of by those with the means to do so, but my point is that there is a period where we truly don’t know how to approach it as a society and there is a learning curve and we are in that adolescent or teenage year type curve for the Internet, and probably toddler stage for ai, and we will learn, but we’re not there yet.

Further, whether we learn enough quickly enough, or whether those with enough power and foresight will truly steal that opportunity from society remains to be seen. It may seem like it will be obvious right now, while we’re in the thick of things, but only history will tell if it’s an obvious eventuality or whether it is comical that they think they are smart enough to actually control it. Maybe it contains the seeds of their own undoing.

I still consider us in something like the teenage years as a society, just discovery something big like the Internet and social media and we’re going to handle it poorly until we learn to handle it responsibly.

Heads or tails whether we make it to adulthood before the powers that be manage to wrangle things in their favor first. Signs point in a bad direction, but there’s no saying that the tools that worked on society before won’t break when the next thing comes along. Maybe ai will take a form that liberates, or hits the powerful far more negatively than it hits the masses.