The one thing that surprises/scares me the most in the current state of affairs is not so much the technology itself (after all, technology needs to be absorbed

The one thing that surprises/scares me the most in the current state of affairs is not so much the technology itself (after all, technology needs to be absorbed by society, and that is surely a bottleneck here), but how fast the research is going. There is something about machine learning / AI research that makes it both faster to do than other types of research and also super motivating. The people who do ML research are basically just working 24/7 and doing that with a smile on their faces. Most other types of research require you to spend a lot of extra time doing boring, bureaucratic stuff (like handling human subjects, complex protocols, lab equipment, endless meetings, etc.) but in ML you just ideate, program, run the tests, write, publish, repeat. (Sure of course you need to do it right, but that is not the point here.) And for those who are researchers at heart, that is the best thing in the world: to be able to do your research and push your results out as quickly and efficiently as possible. So nowadays a paper comes out with some new and interesting development, then two months later there are 30 other papers with significant improvements over that first one. (Yes there is a lot of junk, but again that's not the point here: the point is that those who are doing it right can do it efficiently) This is the most incredible thing about this whole situation, and maybe the most scary: there is no way to stop this avalanche of research, because it's not a centralized thing: it's just a bunch of human beings doing what they love, with motivation (both financial and personal). Nobody can stop this. If someone happens to press the doom button in the middle of this, well... that's it!