[aspenmartin]

That’s a fair point to the first part, but if you look at the numbers it’s also just not true. Poverty went from 38% to 10%, scientific progress was enormous (imagine doing a lit review in 1980). Internet destroyed old media yet aggregate employment didn’t collapse. Developing economies got access to global markets. Yea I mean ok I’m glued to my phone now, that’s bad, but to your point and to make a second argument (which I sort of blended into my original comment): this is inevitable. It’s inefficient not to have done the internet. The idea of “if <country> had somehow avoided connecting their society to the internet they would have been just fine” is just not logical: they would be completely disconnected from the entire world economy and their economy would be incredibly inefficient and stagnant. You would have rioting in the streets. Do you think life in Iran without the internet is better?

Similarly for AI: yea there will be serious downsides not least of which you doing this will be surveillance and centralized state power and suffering for people ill positioned to navigate the transition. It would be more damaging to not let AI develop fully and to engage in the global competition that the US is strategically winning at this point (though China will probably figure out how to get around their compute starvation in the next ~5 or so years).