This gung-ho government says we have nothing to fear from AI. Are you scared yet?

theguardian.com:

It’s almost 20 years now since a socially awkward young computer science student set up a website for rating “hot” women.

Facemash, as Mark Zuckerberg called his creation, was shut down within days. But this crass teenage experiment was still, in retrospect, the first faltering step down a road to something even he couldn’t possibly have foreseen at the time: a social media phenomenon now accused of unwittingly helping to polarise society, destabilise the democratic process, fuel hate speech and disseminate dangerous conspiracy theories around the globe, despite what providers insist have been their best attempts to stamp out the fire.

We couldn’t have predicted then, and arguably still don’t properly understand now, what impact Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or TikTok have hadon teenage mental health. We couldn’t have anticipated how life online would change our sense of self, blurring the line between private life and public content; didn’t grasp until too late how algorithms developed to drive social media consumption would shape what we read or hear, and consequently how we think or feel. But if we couldn’t have accurately predicted that from the start, with hindsight, there were surely moments along the road when the penny should have dropped.

Had governments not allowed the tech giants to race so far ahead of regulation, they might have saved themselves years of clearing up the resulting mess. But blinded by the riches the industry generated, and diverted by the pleasure its products have undoubtedly given along the way, we all missed the moment. The fear is that we’re about to do the same with something infinitely more powerful and unpredictable.

Artificial intelligence is arguably both the most exciting thing that