I don't see cars as being comparable to the universal usage of electrical energy as an intermediate of converting physical forms of energy. Not even close.

And also, the "deployment" of cars if you will, has brought and still brings malignant effecfs on society, not only positives. If by cars you mean cars for transporting individual people in non-critical situations and the corresponding industrial and political developments, especially around urban planning.

Nor arguing about the significance of the effects, but the discovery of electricity and how to use it seem more useful to me than the discovery of using fossil fuel cumbustion for transporting people.

Road transit in total is a different thing of course.

If a technology has positives and negatives consequences for the world, but the positives outweigh the negatives, then we want those technologies to be developed. For cars, the positives outweigh the negatives.

Regarding the comparison: it's just that there are infinitely many modes of transporting people different from cars, that's why I argued against it.

I would not argue against the point that cars in themselves are very useful.

If the point however is how we are using them and how many of them we build or how we arrange our living around the necessary public infrastructure to use cars for anythint, I'm not sure if I agree.

IMO, as of now, this is a case of "market failure", if you will. But I know that the majority of people don't agree with this.

As I see it, one of the main usages of cars seems to be to use them for not having to be around car traffic: e.g. living in suburbs, "escaping" into nature on the weekends.

I don't think anyone (well maybe the Amish) are arguing that all technology is bad. Only that some technology might be bad, and it is worth trying to figure out the implications of releasing increasingly capable models to the public.

>For cars, the positives outweigh the negatives

TBD: climate change is the unaddressed elephant in that room

Is this meant to be convincing? All you’re doing is asserting that the positives outweigh the negatives and starting from there.

That is the point of disagreement. We do not currently know if the positives outweigh the negatives.

I am saying that market incentives are good at spurring more people to scale these systems and their deployments up, and those incentives are not good at mitigating negative externalities.

What I am pointing out is that the system of incentives surrounding these technologies has failed to produce anything resembling a safe development trajectory. No, these systems are not quite sky-is-falling-scary yet, but if AI development achieves its promise, they absolutely will be.

We have no reason to believe, as a commenter asserts below, that in just a few more inches closer to potential catastrophe we (who?) will decide (how?) to pull the reins (where?).

When cars were first entering the market they were only legally allowed to go at 4mph and a guy had to walk in front of it with a big flag.

I don't think it's the example you want to use.

Fear of AI has been real and well-articulated for at least 70 years.

The current trajectory has done very little to assuage those fears and quite a bit to validate or even amplify them.