The human mind doesn't really grok exponential curves very well. We tend to perceive them more as flat and then suddenly they go vertical. In that regard, soci

The human mind doesn't really grok exponential curves very well. We tend to perceive them more as flat and then suddenly they go vertical. In that regard, society's response to recent progress in AI appears clumsy and ineffective to me. Surely people don't think banning generated essays or art is going to fix whatever problem they perceive? This stuff is improving quicker than we can adapt, and any response that attempts to halt, delay, or ignore this progress is destined to fail. There are a lot of things we need to be prepared for, and since our current approach is reactive rather than proactive, I'm worried AI is going to arrive more like an earthquake than a smooth transition into what could potentially be a utopia for humanity. For instance, if we don't acknowledge that many types of jobs are going to be eliminated within a timespan of a few years (as opposed to the multigenerational timescale of the industrial revolution), then we are essentially condemning a large number of people to a sudden loss of income that is likely to be irreversible for those who are unable to retrain into a different profession quickly enough. Regardless of one's philosophy on universal basic income, I think most of us can agree that a society that stands by silently as millions of people who are willing to work lose their livelihood is not a moral society. To prevent this outcome requires a significant deal of foresight and proactivity that we don't currently seem to have. The other major problem I see (and one that is quite prevalent on HN) is an inappropriately symmetrical "penalty function" for forecasts in AI development—i.e., one that gives equal weight to the predictions "AI is arriving soon; the singularity is near" and "we're nowhere close to AGI; LLMs are just fancy high-dimensional interpolators and we may never reach true intelligence". The cost of erroneously preparing for the former outcome is mild: we wasted time on another AI winter, some unnecessary policies were created, and there was an annoying media hype cycle. But the consequences of a type II error are massive: most people cannot provide a meaningful contribution to the economy so all wealth rapidly funnels to a few people, the general population loses the ability to discern truth (well... beyond the extent to which this has occurred already), rapid existential change destabilizes the human psyche, and so on... not to mention any risk posed by AI directly (e.g., war, hacking, manipulation).