When we talk about AI, we probably overestimate what human intelligence may be and how evenly it is distributed. Sure, your job probably can't be done by an ML

When we talk about AI, we probably overestimate what human intelligence may be and how evenly it is distributed. Sure, your job probably can't be done by an ML model yet, but I'd practically guarantee your middle-managers probably could. I can't help but think a lot of humans haven't achieved the "human level intelligence," these speakers attribute to everyone else. They talk about these models not being able to achieve human level intelligence (HLI?) because even though we are language oriented, we can do things like learn to drive in a few hours vs. this task being currently much more difficult for machines - but all those comparisons are to competencies in our physical environment that are not relevant to a media environment, which exists as a substrate for the narratives people use to shape their beliefs and identities. If we overestimate how intelligent people really are, LLM's may be more powerful than we think. Explosives may be a useful analogy, where we could bring to bear mechanical power and leverage to a ceiling of its ability in our environment, but once we harnessed chemical (and eventually, atomic) reactions, the things we can create with them can be trillions of times as powerful as our respective abilities. Humans with springs and levers weren't that powerful after all, and the risk is that what we call HLI is, relatively, springs and levers level powerful. This might seem like an argument in favour of a pause, where in LLM's we have managed to invent the equivalent of an intellectual explosive, but I would argue we need to accelerate and spread understanding of ML past the point of where it can be monopolized by a small cadre of social engineers. The only thing that prevents you being managed by a machine is the physical competency and market value to decline it, and pausing to add governance now will be specifically to deprive you of that. The advocates for an ML development pause seem all about progress when that means redistributing things others already have and inserting themselves as governance, but they are absolutely against it when this progress means producing something net-new that could reduce the ability of said managers to be the ones to be the redistributors. I think we should only accelerate AI tools development so that they can provide more equal opportunity to all, and let people create their own disincentives for using it for the systemic oppression that I can also guarantee it will be used for if we pause to let the gatekeepers in.