When has that ever happened when major technological advancements have taken place.
When the automobile became available to the mass public, do you think anyone cared about the horse and buggy manufacturers, what about when air travel became available to the public do you think anyone cared about the train industry.
The entire industrial revolution created mass upheaval in the world.
My point, we’ve had major technological shifts in the past, this is nothing really different, we should embrace AI and use it to advance the human experience just like major technological advancements in the past.
Except we didn’t have hydrogen or nuclear bombs at that time so we didn’t have much to fear from a rogue car or train. In the wrong hands, AI can be used to disrupt our society and even destroy our civilization.
I respectfully disagree FRiend.
The current trajectory of AI is fundamentally distinct from any past technological revolution. We are no longer simply creating tools that amplify human physical labor or streamline computations; we are engineering autonomous, cognitive agents capable of recursive self-improvement. That can actually ‘think’, and do that in a way that is better+faster than many humans (soon to be most/all humans, and then massively better).
The leap from the Industrial Revolution to the Information Age was massive, but the leap to Artificial General Intelligence (some say that some of the frontier models, eg the unrestricted Mythos, is basically already AGI) and Artificial Superintelligence (when we get there, and that is basically the creation of a small ‘g’ god) is entirely unprecedented.
The horse-drawn hoe, loom, cotton gin, steam engine, automobile, nuclear energy, computer, internet all could not do one thing …think! AI can, and is getting better at it, and soon at the level where it is AI that is training itself.
To be honest, thinking about the ‘nuclear’ thing made me realize that is actually a poor comparison. The threat is less similar to that of nuclear weapons, but rather of biological weapons. Since those can replicate themselves and spread far beyond their original target blast area, which may be why they are banned (even by countries like the US and Russia that own thousands of nukes) because the use of a biological weapon could easily come back and get you. What did my standard 6 teacher in Kenya use to call it: ‘hoisted by your own petard’ or something like that.
But hey, I’m just some dude on the internet. What do I know? What does anyone on this forum know? Which is why I prefer to see what the heads of the AI companies are saying, since those people are not just ‘experts’ but are really experts (without the “ “).
Which is why the most compelling evidence for these dangers comes not from outside skeptics, but from the very architects of the technology. Figures like Elon Musk (xAI/Grok) and Dario Amodei (Anthropic) have repeatedly highlighted the catastrophic risks involved. What is SUPER CRAZY is that these leaders find themselves trapped in a game-theoretic arms race, rushing headlong toward AGI partly out of a deeply ingrained fear that if they do not build it first, a competitor (such as Sam Altman’s OpenAI, who is interestingly disliked by both Musk and Amodei) will. Or China (which according to the former head of Google (Eric Schmidt, who green lit back then Google’s DeepMind that resulted in Gemini AI, and has been advising President Trump on AI) China is only around 6 months behind the leading US frontier AI models.
Those are not random internet people like me and others on this forum.
Those worries extend well beyond the heads of those AI companies.
A growing exodus of senior researchers and safety engineers have resigned from top AI labs, publicly citing grave concerns over the deprioritization of safety in favor of rapid product shipping. Furthermore, the “godfathers of AI,” including Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio (again, not random people on the web like me and others on this forum), have explicitly warned that the timeline to AGI is accelerating faster than our ability to control it. Documents circulating within the industry, such as Leopold Aschenbrenner’s widely read Situational Awareness manifesto (often associated with the “2027 AGI” timeline predictions), outline a chillingly plausible path to superintelligence within this decade, bringing with it unprecedented national security and existential threats.
I know there is a human need to downplay things (the Titanic will not sink, the iceberg just scratched it a bit and we will buff it out once we get to port), in the same way there is a human need to catastrophize things (the sky is falling, the Orange Man is bad, etc).
However, I do think AI is a real danger unlike any we have seen before.
Even if we completely avoid existential catastrophe, the immediate economic reality is stark.
I utilize (and love) AI in my daily workflow (and by AI I mean deep/advanced work across emerging markets private equity) but the writing is on the wall. From a senior vantage point in private equity, my career runway is secure (I am senior enough to survive several more years, plus I made the right life decisions for over two decades so I am better than OK), but the traditional job pipeline for most is already obsolete.
The reality is that I simply do not need analysts or associates anymore.
Deep financial modeling, market research, and portfolio analysis can be executed faster and more accurately by an LLM. It is only a matter of time before this capability moves further up the ladder and eventually reach even more senior people.
This devastation will sweep across almost the entire white-collar spectrum.
Unless a job heavily relies on physical interaction (like a plumber or a masseuse or, as one of those AI ‘greats’ said, a prostitute), anything that requires a computer or learned cognitive knowledge is fundamentally at risk.
Certain professions will inevitably build regulatory moats to protect themselves …it is highly unlikely we will allow AI politicians (congress critters will ensure they are not at risk) or AI judges anytime soon, as those in power will legislate their own survival, and certain medical practices will still legally require a human being despite an AI’s superior diagnostic accuracy.
But for the vast majority of the knowledge economy (eg, lawyers, consultants, analysts, and writers) the disruption will be absolute.
Anyways: that is a long read, and I apologize for that.
But let me say one more thing: I REALLT hope you are 100% correct and there is nothing to worry about. I genuinely hope so.
For all our sakes.
This is wholly different from Trains, Planes and Automobiles. AI as presented is a total fraud. These data centers being pushed right now are purely being built to further our surveillance state. Doubt that at your own peril. Anyone pushing it are enemies to humanity.
So... How many Shares do you own?