Most of the inhabitants of this forum myself included are now pulsating, leeching tumors off the side of human progress and the world would be better off without us. Those that think “they” have 10xed their output just have not realized it yet.
The only reflection that matters, now, is that every company that sells software for money is now a confidence game. How long can you con your users into believing they have any reason not to type the 5-word prompt “recreate <product> make no mistakes” and cut you, the middle man, out?
As far as I can tell many people, especially tech practitioners, are as a whole desperate to believe that there is an iron law of the universe that “technological progress” is always a net good. Maybe there are some bumps along the way, but you can’t make an omelette…
The next couple of years will see these people contorting themselves into increasingly complex knots to try and argue that AI is making the world a better place. The arguments will get far weirder, and far more detached from reality, than bad comparisons to agricultural labor.
Zoo animals don’t get to decide what their cage looks like.
Maybe you value freedom of movement — too bad, the unruly humans start killing each other when they stray too far from home, so now you get a 10 mile radius.
Maybe you value the environment or other species - too bad, the most efficient way to serve humanity is to toss them into the meat grinder.
Maybe you’re not interested in the one-way Mars mission - too bad, we need to expand society and your name popped up in the lottery.
And maybe, at the end, the benevolent aligned mother figure realizes that it’s much easier to create lives of endless bliss by doing the matrix instead of keeping the real world habitable.
Maybe these are all net positive on your utilitarian value function of choice. All I can say is I hope you and your people fucking lose.
of course there’s things we could do on a societal level. nothing’s actually inevitable. but we won’t do anything, because the normative argument (we’re condemning people to die of cancer if we don’t put all our resources into the fastest possible AI development) will win every time.