[ctoth]

> And Matt Shumer is saying that AI is currently like Covid in January 2020—as in, "kind of under the radar, but about to kill millions of people"

This is where the misrepresentation... no, the lie comes in. It always does in these "sensible middle" posts! the genre requires flattening both sides into dumber versions of themselves to keep the author positioned between two caricatures. Supremely done, OP.

If you read Matt's original article[0] you see he was saying something very different. Not "AI is going to kill lots of people" but that we're at the point on an exponential curve where correct modeling looks indistinguishable from paranoia to anyone reasoning from base rates of normal experience. The analogy is about the epistemic position of observers, not about body counts.

[0]: https://shumer.dev/something-big-is-happening