The rapid development of AI could lead to people generally being frightened away from digital products. In my own social environment, I see more and more people who used to be very enthusiastic about computers turning away to more analog entertainment and work.
Blindly developing technology only as part of the "power play" without solving real problems is no longer justifiable. AI is starting to create significantly more problems than it has actually solved, comparable to the fossil fuel industry.
The sheer audacity to claim that 'fossil fuel industry' has "created significantly more problems than it has actually solved"
If you leave the SF bubble for a split second, and think about the foundations of modern industry, you would realize fossil fuels have created tectonic value for society, that's why transitioning away is so so hard.
All the 'real problems', like housing costs, medical costs, education costs, occur in the most highly regulated areas of the economy. Not technology.
"The sheer audacity to claim that 'fossil fuel industry' has "created significantly more problems than it has actually solved""
One of the problems of modern discourse is that an idea or meme takes hold and has a life of itself, it becomes the center of attraction without refence past history, past events, etc.
I'm not a climate change denier nor do I disagree that using fossil fuels has huge environmental consequences but no rational person could deny that we owe our whole modern life to fossil fuels. The Industrial Revolution absolutely depended on coal, it has been the lifeblood of modern society for at least 300 years. It is simply unimaginable to envisage modern life without its existence.
Moreover, what's lost in this debate is that coal is not just a source of energy, it is also the source of a many other useful materials. When I was learning about this decades ago we were taught that coal was the source of so many useful products that we round that number off to '1000' to signal its importance.
In fact, coal provides many more than a 1000 useful products, the pharmaceutical couldn't do without it. The previous poster should contemplate the fact that even common old aspirin comes from coal—in fact many pharmaceutical texts place aspirin in a class of drugs known as the coal-tar antipyretics.
Wild assertions of this type happen when we stop teaching history, how modern society came about and so on. A dose of philosophical reasoning and logic ought to be taught as well, that way reason may hold back many from uttering and spreading crap.
While I'm with you overall -- cheap transport alone has made our lives easily of times better -- there's at least one giant problem that occurs mostly due to lack of regulation, which is environmental degradation.
Finding new optimization techniques, understanding genetics, developing new science can all be intellectually defensible.
Of course it is not the only factor: the asymmetry in computing and data access by big corporations vs the individual, the generative models generating spam, as you well said. are all factors. But just like with the oil industry, there is also some good consequences. Which ones will dominate left as an exercise for the reader :)
Blindly developing technology only as part of the "power play" without solving real problems is no longer justifiable. AI is starting to create significantly more problems than it has actually solved, comparable to the fossil fuel industry.