[CamperBob2]

It also depends on how panicked people are. Covid was never going to spread like ebola, for instance: it was worse. Bad enough to harm and kill people, but not bad enough to scare them into self-enforced isolation and voluntary compliance with public health measures.

Back on the subject of AI, I think the flat part of the curve has always been in sight. Transformers can achieve human performance in some, even many respects, but they're like children who have to spend a million years in grade school to learn their multiplication tables. We will have to figure out why that is the case and how to improve upon it drastically before this stuff really starts to pay off. I'm sure we will but we'll be on a completely different S-shaped curve at that point.