I want to preface by saying, I personally don’t know enough about AI to speak with authority on the topic, as I am not a computer scientist. However, as a layp

I want to preface by saying, I personally don’t know enough about AI to speak with authority on the topic, as I am not a computer scientist. However, as a layperson, I do have thoughts about it. Firstly, I am glad people are talking about it with regard to governance. It seems to me that many everyday people are largely unaware of any risks posed by the current AI’s without even getting into any futuristic debates about it. More everyday people should be joining in the conversation, but it seems they don’t realise they need to, and unfortunately for the AI doomerists, rather than engaging everyday people they just come across as a new type of conspiracy theorist. I think they need to be better rehearsed in the art of rhetoric and more persuasive with their arguments if they want to engage people - but I secretly don’t think they want to, I think they want to control the discussion. Secondly, even as a layperson, to me it seems unrealistic to just halt R&D into AI. I can’t imagine everyone involved in it will agree to this. Additionally, any nefarious people or organisations would have a massive advantage if all the “good guys” (but who are the good guys?) just paused for a bit to engage in philosophical pondering over the many “what if’s” that we can and cannot comprehend as merely intelligent humans, and how to manage these "what if's". Thirdly, on the face of it, artificial intelligence seems to me a distinct and different kind of intelligence to our own. So I am personally perplexed by the assumptions made about the risks it poses. These risks seem to be made in reference to a sort of superhuman intelligence, is it superhuman or is it something else? Perhaps my thought here highlights my ignorance. Does it spell the end of humanity? I just simply do not know enough about it to have any truely meaningful opinion about it, which brings me to my fourth point. Why is it an elite bunch of wealthy computer nerds that dominate the discourse on this topic? This seems a problem created by them, for them, that apparently affects every other single human on the earth. I find it hard to take them seriously, and I hope they’re not the only people involved in meaningful discussions around governance and how to solve associated problems. These people created the apparent existential problem. My worry is can and should us lay people trust them to solve it, if it's even possible to solve it.