Agreed. As I’m sure you know, it’s easier for people to reason when the arena presents only discrete possibilities, especially binary ones, eg yes/no or black/white.

The arena of the continuous, which encompasses most of the natural world, is far more difficult. It doesn’t allow for the sort of arguments where one can assert things with ego-boosting absolute confidence.

Matters of scale naturally fall into the continuous sort, but scale can also introduce new discrete possibilities. Perhaps we need to present the new specific, discrete effects and outcomes that AI-at-scale will introduce. Maybe, just maybe, that’ll change minds of people who are truly open to being changed.

My intuition though is that this argument is repeated here (on HN in particular) not for lack of knowledge or thought, but rather because they WANT to see the chaos that’ll result. They want all the positives and negatives, no matter the balance, simply because it’s exciting and adds to their “mundane” lives. Where the mundanity is of course subjective, simply the result of their default worldview, rather than anything nearing an objective description of the world as it is.