[psacawa]

Facile comparisons like this are very frustrating. Two thoughts:

i) What makes you believe that they weren't correct, and the timespan for this annihilation isn't e.g. 100 years? That would be an instant in comparison with the timespan of humanity. Indeed, in the present, we have gene therapy and genetic engineering. It's easy to imagine these technologies might go off the rails.

ii) Another doomsday prediction from a UN official in the 1970s: anthropogenic climate change will make the planet uninhabitable by year 2000. "That was 50 years ago! Clearly nothing to worry about! The UN lied! Al Gore lied! This party will never end!!"

As you know, such attitudes are widespread. These are the attitudes which express the notion that since one past prognosis didn't manifest according to schedule, then it never shall. They are common in response to climate change, but not only. This is the same facile reasoning your comment endorses.

[yborg]

My comment was mostly in relation to the short-term reaction to the rise of a new technology, not in the general validity of the concerns. Once the risks of gene-splicing technologies were better understood, protocols were established around research, and eventually societal understanding of these risks created some guardrails (labeling of GMO foods, etc.) I assume the same will happen with ML model applications.

And your comparison to human-generated climate change is itself facile since ML and recombinant DNA technologies are specific technological developments with immediately observable implications. Climate change is the result of the sum total of human economic activity in many areas whose implications took decades to become apparent (more than a century, if you start counting from the Industrial Revolution). If we were discussing some technology specifically designed to affect climate the comparison would be more valid.

[asdff]

On the other hand, the labeling of GMO foods is less a guardrail and more an appeasement to anti GMO groups. There will be a point in the future with a changing climate where everyone will have to be eating genetically modified foods whether they like it or not, and vilifying them is only going to ensure confusion. Even more dangerously is that its not just the nutjobs you can easily ignore doing this stuff; the fancy expensive hummus in your grocery store is labelled "Non GMO" which adds a layer of legitimacy to the movement.